Ballwin Watercolorist's Career Spans More Than Seven Decades

Seventy-five years is a long time to do anything, but that is how long Chrystal Jackson has been painting. Now in her 80s, the Ballwin resident continues creating watercolors and teaching future artists how to do the same.

Jackson was born in London to American parents. Her mother was a skilled photographer who passed her artistic talents onto Chrystal at a young age. She graduated from the Pratt Institute in New York City before studying with renowned watercolor artist Eliot O’Hara, who has been referred to as “the father of American watercolor.”

Jackson then traveled to Spain, where she held her first exhibitions in Barcelona and Madrid. She also maintained a watercolor diary during her time in Spain that chronicled her experiences.

In her diary, she wrote: “'I think we have a regular lady Gauguin,' claimed Austrian artist, sculptor and typographer Victor Hammer at his Hammer Gallery in New York."

Following her return from Spain, Jackson’s career began to pick up.  She went to Bavaria, Germany for National Geographic Magazine to replicate the sketchbooks she had created in Spain. 

Then, she was asked by NASA to come to Cape Canaveral in Florida, along with 47 other artists, to record the early days of the space program. Today, 170 of these drawings and paintings are displayed at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

While in Spain, Jackson married and had her son, Christopher. Jackson and her son moved to St. Louis in the 1960s. He grew up to establish a reputation of his own as an artist and composer. He wrote more than 30 musicals before his sudden death from cancer in 2007 at the age of 47. Jackson described his death as “a crushing blow.”

Jackson continues on with her art and has been featured in 10 coffee table books, where she is placed alongside such artists as Norman Rockwell, Robert Rauschenberg and James Wyeth. Additionally, she has also written several children’s books and continues to paint and feature her famous watercolor butterflies and murals at art fairs.

She also teaches new art students about her “Dematerialistic Theory of Art” in which the beauty of art reflects the spiritual more than the physical.

“Instead of a grain of sand, we should be a shell,” Jackson said regarding her love of art and the importance of teaching it to new generations. And that is exactly what she plans to do. After more than seven decades, there is still no end in sight for this local artist and teacher.