We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jackson Wrede a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Jackson , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
You’d think art school would teach you how to paint, but that’s not really the case. Most university art programs today focus on exploring interdisciplinary, conceptual, and postmodern approaches to art making rather than teaching the nuts and bolts of traditional painting technoques. If you want to learn how to make “stuff look like stuff” as I say—how to capture form, light, and texture with precision—it’s surprisingly difficult to find proper instruction in the mainstream art establishment.
Most of what I’ve learned in that regard has come from my own independent research. I’ve spent countless hours watching YouTube videos, reading old art books, studying paintings in museums, and attending workshops led by realist painters I admire. But at the end of the day, the real teacher is trial and error through hours and hours spent in the studio. Repetition is the mother of skill, and every painting is another step forward, another lesson learned.
One of the biggest misconceptions about realist art is that it’s a talent—some innate gift that certain people are just born with. It’s not. It’s a skill like anything else. Like playing the piano, it requires discipline, repetition, and a deep understanding of its fundamental principles. No one sits down at a piano and instinctively plays like Chopin; they practice, refine their technique, and develop a system that works for them. Painting is no different. Mastery comes from hours of dedication, not from some mythical natural ability.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’m a contemporary realist oil painter who seeks to blend traditional craftsmanship with a modern sensibility. My work spans portraiture, still life, landscape, and pop art, reflecting both my versatility and deep appreciation for art history. Rather than adhering to a single genre, I strive to merge tradition and innovation, creating paintings that feel both timeless and distinctly of our time.
Art has been a lifelong pursuit for me. I’ve been drawing for as long as I can remember, though as a kid, I never realized that being an oil painter was an actual profession you could have in the real world. That changed sometime in high school when people started paying me for my work. What began as a handful of small commissions gradually evolved into a full-time career, built through years of dedicated practice and continuous improvement.
Today, I primarily work on commission, painting everything from wedding portraits and landscapes of places my clients have visited on vacation to unique, one-of-a-kind concepts brought to life from their imagination. My job is to transform a personal vision into a tangible, enduring work of art on canvas. In an era where images are mass-produced and disposable, I offer something rare—paintings that take weeks or even months to complete, heirlooms that will last for generations.
Beyond commissioned work, I dedicate significant time to my own artistic pursuits, creating pieces that I exhibit in galleries and competitions around the world. I’ve been fortunate to receive recognition in prestigious exhibitions, which not only sustains my career but also pushes me further toward my ultimate ambition: to be remembered as one of the most skilled and significant artists of my generation. Of course, that’s a lofty goal, but whether or not I achieve it, I take pride in the fact that I get to wake up every day and do what I love, largely living life on my own terms. The path of an artist comes with sacrifices, but for me, the reward of creating something meaningful far outweighs the challenges.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
People create art for so many different reasons—some as a form of therapy, others for self-expression or exploration. For me, art is inherently competitive. Perhaps it comes from my background in athletics, but I’m driven by the challenge of pushing my technical skills and striving for a level of craftsmanship that demands attention. The most rewarding part isn’t just the act of creating but witnessing people’s reactions when they see my work. I love when they stop and stare, unsure whether what they’re looking at is a painting, and questioning how it was even made. That moment of disbelief, of being genuinely gobsmacked, is what makes all the effort worthwhile.
That sense of awe is what first drew me to painting. When I visited museums and galleries as a kid, I was captivated by works that seemed almost impossible—paintings so masterful that they made me think, I can’t believe a human being created this. That feeling stuck with me, and it’s what I want to pass on to my own viewers. I want my work to elicit the same kind of wonder and admiration, to make people pause and appreciate not just the image but the sheer dedication behind it. At its core, my motivation comes from a deep respect for excellence—both in the artists who inspired me and in my own pursuit of creating something that feels truly exceptional.
Have you ever had to pivot?
One of the biggest pivots in my career came after I finished graduate school. Throughout my BFA and MFA programs, my work was rooted in pop art-inspired collage paintings—bold, graphic, and heavily influenced by popular culture. I was layering images, pulling from cartoons, advertisements, and mass media, creating work that was playful, irreverent, and fast. It was a completely different mindset from what I do now. At the time, I had no real foundation in classical realism because it wasn’t necessary for that kind of work. But after graduating, I was faced with a harsh reality: there weren’t companies hiring oil painters, and if I was going to make a career on my own, I needed to create work that people actually wanted to buy. What I quickly realized was that while my pop-art-inspired paintings were fun and got attention, they didn’t have the same personal connection that people looked for when purchasing original art. Collectors weren’t interested in owning a collage of mass-media imagery—they wanted something that felt meaningful, skillful, and lasting.
That realization completely reshaped my approach to painting. I had to step back and rebuild my technical abilities from the ground up, learning to paint with precision, depth, and the kind of craftsmanship that could stand the test of time. I went from making fast, graphic, and idea-driven pieces to creating painstakingly detailed, highly realistic oil paintings that demand patience and discipline. It was a complete shift—not just in technique, but in philosophy. My work now is about permanence, beauty, and mastery of the medium, rather than the fleeting, disposable nature of pop culture. It’s funny—some people still associate me with my early pop-art phase, but that version of me as a painter doesn’t exist anymore. For the past five years, most of my focus has been on classical realism, and making that transition wasn’t just a career move—it was a reinvention of my identity as an artist.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.jacksonwrede.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jacksonwrede/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61563310081178
Image Credits
Gillian Becker