Gavin Jordan

Contemporary artist and creator of Chalkline Figuration™: an acrylic chalkboard ground, chalk drawing, and oil painting layered so memory stays visible in the finished work. The method holds past and present in the same surface. Chalk for what was provisional. Oil for what becomes permanent. Earlier screw work was shown in Making Home: The Underground Library at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York, 2024. Current series continue that preoccupation with memory, childhood, and resilience.

Every painting begins with the acrylic chalkboard background. Then chalk: the figure sketched, the symbols placed, the composition mapped. Then oil over the chalk. Some of the chalk disappears beneath the paint. Some of it survives as a ghost underneath. What was drawn first stays present in a different form.

This is Chalkline Figuration. Board, chalk, oil. Oil for what is real. Chalk for what is remembered. Symbols for what it means. The subjects will keep changing. The method stays.

For years the work was built differently: thousands of screws placed at precise depths to create three-dimensional paintings you could touch. Sculptured paintings that brought the figure outward, into the room. That work was included in Making Home at Cooper Hewitt. The obsession with depth started there. Now it goes inward, chalk and oil on a chalkboard ground creating emotional depth that lives beneath the surface.

The current series, Songs of the Unbroken, is a 20-piece body of work, In progress in the Miami studio — about half the body is painted. Available works are listed under Collect; the full series premiere comes when all twenty are finished.