JACKSON WREDE | 1ST PLACE
2025 PORTRAITS COMPETITION

Although Seattle-based artist Jackson Wrede’s impressive paintings are grounded in classical technique, he is clearly guided by a modern sensibility. His work includes realistic portraiture, landscape, and still lifes as well as pop-cultural symbolism — all deliberate, layered, and rich with texture. His award-winning work can be found in private collections, galleries, and institutions across the country.

“My mission is to reaffirm and reinvigorate the status of painting as a vital contemporary medium,” Wrede says. “In a world consumed by fleeting digital images and the relentless pace of modern life, I believe the timeless authenticity of oil painting holds unparalleled significance.”

We recently had the opportunity to ask Wrede about his work.

You were recently selected for a Seattle Prize fellowship which supports emerging artists for two years, allowing them to focus on their classical, figurative artwork. Can you tell us what this means to you?

There’s this notion that artists have to endure long stretches of struggle and obscurity before finally catching their elusive “big break.” I had basically accepted that the best path forward was simply to persist, keep my head down, and keep making better and better paintings with each passing year.

The Seattle Prize feels like a refutation of that old story and an opportunity that could meaningfully shape the course of my career. It’s a chance to work alongside some amazing painters who I believe will draw something new and elevated out of me. After relocating to Seattle a few weeks ago, I already feel a powerful new sense of energy and possibility and this feeling that I may be on the threshold of the best work of my life.

Your portraits span quite a range from classical realism to pop art to cartoon-inspired aesthetics. Across such diverse styles, what uniting themes or ideas consistently weave through your work?

What ties my paintings together isn’t a single visual style so much as a consistent curiosity about my subjects. Each piece begins with a genuine fascination. My interests are broad, and with every new project, these different ideas seem to compete for attention until one eventually wins and insists on being painted. I try not to overanalyze that process and instead just paint what calls to me, and I’ll leave it to others to decide what my work ultimately means. I’m just the one who shows up at the easel to paint.

Your work often references Old Masters like Titian and Rembrandt. What do you think their legacy offers to contemporary portraiture that modern techniques can’t replicate?

Titian and Rembrandt painted in a world ungoverned by modernity’s tyranny of objectivity and rationality. Their vision of reality wasn’t confined by the scientific or photographic, it was animated by mystery, intuition, and a spiritual depth that feels largely absent in today’s world. Because of that, their paintings possess a kind of magic that does not merely imitate life but interprets it through a very strange but beautiful lens.

Contemporary realism, by contrast, often gets evaluated by how faithfully it can reproduce a reference image. Sometimes, of course, that’s what being a commission painter calls for, but when I’m left to my own devices, I find myself reaching toward that older, more poetic understanding of truth that values wonder over precision.

What were your early influences and how did they affect the way you approach art today?

In college, my early portfolio leaned heavily on street art and pop culture collage imagery. Only after I finished my formal education did I begin to feel a deeper pull toward realism and beauty, which are mainly what I’m interested in now. Those early influences haven’t vanished entirely though, and sometimes you still see them in my art.

What place do you think original oil paintings have in our digital world today?

In an era defined by screens and algorithms, I think there’s a growing hunger for things made by human hands; objects that exist in space, not just in pixels. As automation and AI accelerate, the ability to create something physical, deliberate, and enduring becomes all the more precious.

A digital image vanishes the moment the power goes out; a painting, by contrast, endures. It carries the marks of time, the touch of its maker, the smell of the paint and its wooden stretcher bars. You can stand before it, move around it, and discover something new with every glance.

Across our culture, I think we are seeing a slow but unmistakable return to authenticity where people are increasingly valuing what is real over what is replicated. I think painting and that special act of leaving a real mark on the world will always hold a place in the human mind and heart.

Tell us about your painting Dune Buggy.

Dune Buggy is a portrait of my wife, Gillian. At first, I was drawn to this image because of its dynamic composition and shapes, but over time, I realized it also reveals something essential about her. Her beauty, yes, but also her spirit — bold, radiant, and free.

The title Dune Buggy is both literal and metaphorical: a nod to the dunes of Northern Michigan where we shot the reference photos for this painting, and to the sense of adventure that defines our life together. Gillian fell so naturally into this unique pose—her arms forming these striking, angular gestures—and I redesigned the background to echo and harmonize with those movements, hopefully funneling the viewers attention to the main points of interest.

To achieve that feeling of convincing sunlight flooding the scene, I had to juggle the light-dark relationships carefully. As a painter, I am often disappointed to remind myself that we can’t paint with actual light. We can only suggest its presence through color and value. The challenge to make a pigment really glow with intensity is a difficult task, and I did my best to succeed in communicating that effect in this painting.

All images © Jackson Wrede, shared with permission