Jules Jackson mastered drawing himself. Being an artist means you can create anything out of your imagination, but picking apart your own image is a challenge not everyone wants. Yet Jules, a Chattanooga, Tennessee-based illustrator and arts administrator, wanted to explore how he saw himself.
His May 2024 series, You Are Jules, first exhibited at Chattanooga’s Stove Works residency and gallery, casts himself as the main character in the story of his own life. “I used to kind of shy away from self-portraiture and keep my practice kind of outward-focused,” he said. “I’m really interested in the narratives that people naturally and subconsciously spin about our lives. Our tendency is to try to condense the things that happen about our lives and put them into being a point or a purpose, when kind of the nature of life is that things are a little more chaotic and random. My tendency is to want for things to be contained in a way that makes sense. I wanted to use self-portraiture to delve into the tensions between these narratives.”
He tried self-portraiture before in the form of a series about a werewolf that looked like him, but You Are Jules was the first time he deconstructed himself into a character in his paintings.
“I want to be vulnerable in my work and push that directness a little bit further and see the elements of humor that can emerge when you’re so on the nose about what you’re doing,”
-Jules Jackson
Each of us has recurring character attributes that might make up our protagonist avatar: a stick-and-poke tattoo, a backwards baseball cap, combat boots. For Jules, it was his fluffy hair, scruffy stubble and big glasses. You Are Jules is a series of ten paintings and a suite of drawings following a fluffy-haired, bespectacled Jackson and his family history, starting with his mother in What Jeanne Saw. Though Jules is an egg inside of her in that particular image, he drew her with the same hair and big glasses he gave himself. His mother’s adolescent self has a curious, placid smile on her face as she peers through a magnifying glass towards potential futures.
“The starting point of the narrative is me literally as an egg cell. If you’re a person with egg cells, you have a finite number of egg cells, but you have them your whole life. I was a part of my mom throughout her whole life and then just so happened to become a person one day,” he said. “We internalize our parents’ histories and influences without thinking about it.”
Even before You Are Jules, Jules’ work has always shown an interest in generations, cycles and sequences. In 2021, Jules completed a series of murals on the Stove Works walls called Birth, Life, and Death in Appalachia that used a blue palette of abstract images to show ceremony and folklore in the region his family calls home.
“I think about my own life and my parents’ lives in Appalachian communities. My family goes back into the Smoky Mountains National Park Area with my mom’s family all the way back to the 1600s. One of the things that interests me is the migration of people out of rural communities into the bigger urban centers looking for big types of jobs. They grew up as farmers and wanted to do office work,” he said. “How has that legacy shaped who I am as a person, how am I connected to the land?” That land is the setting of the You Are Jules story, as Jules has lived in the Chattanooga area for his entire life and remains close to multiple generations of his family.
There’s a tendency to want to break up life into milestones or into choices you can’t take back. Birth, Life, and Death in Appalachia explores how we ritualize those moments through baby showers, birthday parties, graduations, weddings, anniversaries and funerals. How those rituals and ceremonies show up is often what define a culture. You Are Jules depicts those “no take backs” moments of choice in Jules’ own life — Big Boy College Grad shows Jules grinning at finishing his degree, and in Foreshortened Jules, a large, unstretched canvas, shows him after gender-affirming surgery.
“Originally, what made me want to do this series was that sometimes in life you have a plan or an idea of how things are gonna go, something happens, you make a decision, that door shuts for you — I still wonder sometimes how my life would’ve gone if I had followed that original plan I didn’t take,” Jules reflected.
Working on You Are Jules allowed him to go back to memories from a more removed perspective.
“When I was younger, I used to look back at myself as ‘cringe,’ but then as time went on, I think of it more as ‘oh, that’s not my life anymore.’ There are just certain realities,” he said. “One iteration of myself is right before I started dressing more masculinely, and sometimes right before that point in time people try to swing the opposite way as this subconscious last-ditch effort to get away. I worked off of a yearbook photo, and I would joke with my friends that that was ‘Deborah from the Front Office’ since I looked so much older than I really was.”
Deborah from the Front Office appears in Five Jules, featuring four iterations of Jules surrounding a glowing, golden “platonic ideal of Jules.” The color palette of purples and yellows came to him subconsciously after a long period of working in blues, and each “Jules” has a mixture of both. It’s remarkable to think about just how much time Jackson must have spent painting his own likeness and how that could bring a person both closer to who they are and make them more removed from their own insecurities.
Jules’ paintings draw from comics and horror stories. Their listed inspirations are Leo Fox’s Prokaryote and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Part of his interest in those genres is the fluidity of the body. His own figures have a fluid, stretchy look to them that draws on the whimsy of cartooning without becoming too kitschy.
“The body is portrayed in such a transformative way in cartoons, not constrained by the laws of real anatomy. That is very appealing to me from the standpoint of approaching trans experience,” he said. Jules treats the subject of his life and experiences with respect, but also doesn’t take it too seriously. “A lot of contemporary art is very ironic or cynical and I really think it would be more productive if it was less like that. I do want to present a statement that’s like, this is the reality of who I am. It is sometimes funny, but this is me.”
A highlight of the catalog is Shoulder Angel Shoulder Devil, where Jules leaned into inspiration from comics. Fictionalized Jules slumps over in bed, laptop open to a dating app called Tinge while a weepy angel and a conniving devil attempt to influence him to either “GET MARRIED BEFORE 30” or “STAY SINGLE FOREVER.” (It’s an interesting look into Jules’ psyche that the devil says to stay single and the angel says to get married…) A comic-like corner panel shows a cartoon monkey, which also appears in some of Jules’ graphite drawings, smoking a cigarette and staring ominously out of the frame. The painting would still be technically strong without it, but the monkey’s random addition adds a laugh-out-loud absurdity and character to it that asserts that this isn’t an abstract narrative about anybody — this is Jules Jackson’s story, and it’s far from over.
