Richard Jackson (B. 1939)

Richard Jackson’s Bad Dog is an intimately scaled version of a work shown at the artist’s 2013 retrospective, Ain’t Painting a Pain, which saw a 24 foot black Labrador mark its territory in yellow paint down the side of the Orange County Museum of Modern Art in California. Completed in 2007, the present work comes from Jackson’s series of painting ‘machines’ which help create the work of art as the artist explores painting beyond its traditional limits. Here, he has engineered for the resin puppy, ironically placed upon a pedestal, to spray paint over a wall. Challenging and questioning how paint can be employed and received, he once said ‘I'm trying to change the way people think about painting and how they relate to it and how painting can occupy a space’. (R. Jackson interviewed by F. Barnes, Time Out, May 16 2014). Bad Dog is a stellar and witty example of Jackson’s spirited work.