Jack, as he was known, originally studied medicine at Cambridge University before announcing to his disappointed father that he was to pursue a career as an artist. He began his artistic training at the St Martin’s School of Art in London, where he was guided by his cousin the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. During the 1930s Jackson lived near the Mall Studies which Hepworth and many other established artists frequented. The artist worked as an abstract painter, perhaps inspired by the modernist approach of his cousin Hepworth. Jackson himself came to be known as one of the foremost painters of the modernist movement in Britain.