Two Pockets Good: The Drake's Work Shirt

By Leanne Cloudsdale

Sep 16, 2022

Two Pockets Good: The Drake's Work Shirt

“It’s a bit embarrassing,” says Jackson Joyce, “but I have this drawing from when I was a child where I’d written that I wanted to be a painter when I grew up. I guess I’ve always gravitated towards it. I could never imagine doing anything else with my life.”

On a breezy summer morning, we meet Joyce at his studio in Brooklyn, light and spacious with exposed floorboards and rows of the artist’s paintings propped and hung on the clean white walls. We’re greeted by his rescue dog, Freddie, “he looks like a cartoon,” says Joyce with a chuckle. Spindly limbs, a shock of white fur and little dark eyes.

Joyce makes ghostly slice of life paintings that draw your attention to the beauty of the everyday. A winter’s morning seen through a bedroom curtain, a bird in flight at dusk, the outline of a hand loosely gripping a cigarette, a leaf sending soft ripples through the surface of a pond. 

“I think, like a lot of artists, I started out making work that I felt I should make, but things changed when I took a bit of a leap of faith and really committed to painting what felt right to me,” says Joyce. “I had to stop comparing myself to other people and not overthink it all too much. It’s important to make work for yourself, and hopefully others will respond to it, too.”

Growing up in Louisiana, Joyce wasn’t exposed to the world of painting until moving to Rhode Island for college, although he did have a slightly more unusual inspiration in the form of his father, who is a children’s book illustrator. “I think he gets a kick out of me being an artist, too,” says Joyce, “and I feel very lucky that I’ve been supported in a career that isn’t necessarily the most stable. He understands the challenges that it presents.”

After a recent gallery show, Joyce is back in the studio working through a handful of ideas. “I’m trying not psych myself out, because you spend so long developing these paintings… and then you just have to do it all over again. I feel like being in the studio is the only time that I’m ever really present, so it’s good to be working again. You just have to keep pushing on.”

Rather than making any great leaps, Joyce is narrowing down on what he calls “observational moments.” People often say I paint the everyday, which I guess sounds a bit mundane? I feel like I’m drawn to simple moments, but they end up feeling bigger when you pay care and attention to them. Something like an empty chair can still have a presence, a memory of who’s sat there or occupies the space in different moments.”

“I like to feel like I’m collecting evidence,” he adds, “I work from a mental image, or these indecipherable little doodles that I use to remember something. It’s made me more observant, and a bit obsessed with things like colour, light and shadow. I try not to paint the same thing too many times, either. I get a lot of requests for birds, but I don’t want to become The Bird Guy, right?”

We step outside onto the studio’s patio, Freddie padding along behind us before lazing in the sunshine. There’s a stainless steel pot that Joyce uses to cook Louisiana seafood boils, a taste from home that he can share with his friends. “I’m grateful that painting has made me more observant,” he says, “there’s a lot of beauty to be found in the little things. I’m just trying to seek out the type of things that might be easy to miss.”