Lot 44
**Originally Listed At $400**
Black Joe Jackson (American, 1922-1997). "Daat Bek" house paint on plywood, n.d. Signed at lower margin and titled down left margin. With his signature palette of flat, saturated housepaint and deft command of compressed space, Black Joe Jackson renders a sun-drenched day at the beach in his characteristically playful and idiosyncratic style. Titled in his phonetic orthography as "Daat Bek" (That Beach), the composition features a series of loosely articulated yet expressively posed figures: a woman in a white swimsuit gazes upward, a child floats midair, likely running in the background, and a reclining sunbather lounges beneath a pink umbrella. Nearby, a figure in red trunks leans forward with a pale, engaging in the timeless pastime of building in the sand - perhaps a castle, perhaps something imagined. Size: 12" W x 15" H (30.5 cm x 38.1 cm)
True to Jackson's visual lexicon, the forms are simplified but full of life, with each figure rendered in flattened profile and stiff-limbed motion that seems to hover between narrative illustration and symbolic tableau. The background is a warm expanse of textured light pink and beige, evoking sand or faded memory, punctuated by blocks of gray, yellow, and red to imply beach towels, shadows, or sandcastles. Across the left and bottom edges, Jackson inscribes the painting with stylized, erratic lettering in bright red - both title and artist's voice rendered in the artist's self-taught vernacular script.
"Daat Bek" exemplifies Jackson's talent for distilling complex human experience into scenes both whimsical and profound. Drawing from memory, folklore, and observation, he offers a beach not of any specific place, but of collective, communal imagination - an environment where joy, leisure, and curiosity coexist with quiet surrealism. As always in Jackson's work, black bodies and black experience occupy the center of the frame, asserting their presence with both quiet dignity and radiant wit.
About the Artist: Black Joe Jackson was a self-taught African-American artist born to a sharecropper family near Atlanta, Georgia in 1920. Jackson created paintings on wooden boards and used easily available materials such as house paint an scrap wood. He was born with dyslexia, and the writings on his paintings demonstrate this. He is oftentimes described as a folk artist or an outsider artist due to his playful, naive style. Jackson's themes reflect memories from his childhood in the South.
Provenance: private Rochester, Minnesota, USA collection, acquired from 1990 -1998
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#192003
- Condition: Signed at lower margin and titled down left margin. Painting is in excellent overall condition with suspension wire on verso for display
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