Jeffery Reddick

Bodie Island Lighthouse

Jefferey Reddick: Contemporary Impressionist
Watercolors, Acrylics & Mixed-media
Art Show in Williamston, NC
Apr 30 – May 30

Jeffery Reddick’s upcoming show at the Martin County Arts Center–in the historic Flatiron Building, downtown Williamston–will showcase over 100 of his original watercolors, acrylics, and mxed media paintings on paper, cardboard, watercolor paper, mattress backing, and linens. 

Jeffery is a self-taught artist living in the Rodgers community outside of the Martin County town of Williamston, NC, where he was born in 1951. 

His impressive artistic output is testament to a talent influenced by a concentrated study of 19th century Impressionist masters such as Monet, Van Gogh, and Renoir. His indomitable spirit and perseverance through 40 years of incarceration in eastern North Carolina gave hm the time to nurture and refine the visions he has come back to repeatedly: lighthouses, landscapes, farm scenes, birds, horses, golfers, boaters, lovers, flowers–lots and lots of flowers. He seamlessly mixes real world scenes with brilliantly imagined ones.

Jeffery’s is a world of beauty, bright colors, deep textures. Contemplative pastorals, many of  them are like pictures viewed through a window frame–sometimes a frame within a frame–seen by an observer drawn to a beauty that’s just outside, beyond reach, who’s observing someone else observing the Edenic scene outside.

Most art in this show will be for sale. A number of not-for-sale decorated envelopes are included in the show.

Jefferey will be on hand for the opening reception for his show, which  will coincide with the opening of the Martin County Arts Council’s annual fine arts exhibition staged at their gorgeously restored Flatiron building. 

April 30 – May 30
opening reception April 30, 6:30 -8:30 p.m
124 Washington St.
Williamston, NC

Free admission.

Jeffery at his Flat Iron show. April 28, 2026.

Background

Jeffery Reddick  attended E.J. Hayes School in Williamston until integration, after which he graduated from Williamston High in 1971. He remembers taking an art class in junior high.

He began serving a life sentence in the North Carolina prison system in 1985, where he read widely, took classes in horticulture, and began painting, most often with watercolors on available materials, often cardboard, discarded office paper, and worn-out sheets and pillowcases from which he salvaged useable squares of “canvas.” He was especially fond of mattress backing because of its heft. “A lot thicker,” he said, though it was harder to come by. He was occasionally threatened with “destruction of state property” offenses, a result of which might sometimes be that a guard would get a lovely floral on a pillowcase–with the evidence gone, no charge could be made. He told me recently how much he still enjoys watching colors find their places on sheets, and he has a favorite thrift store–the Bargain Shoppe, operated by Martin County’s Council on Aging–that sells for $5 a grocery bag full of clean, pressed white sheets and pillowcases.

While on state, Jefferey also took a few painting courses and entered watercolors in prison art shows in New Bern and Greenville. He also studied calligraphy, a talent sometimes displayed in his watercolors but  especially evident in his many envelopes and letters.

Upon parole in late 2024, he received a $45 gate check. He lived with sister Tessie in Spartanburg and more recently back in his home community, where his brother has a small trailer park. 

The first Jeffery I purchased, in 1996, of a type he calls his “farm scenes”

I met Jeffery through the NC prison system and an art show that was staged at a Greenville, NC mall in 1996 after I managed to buy a watercolor from that show, and then another, and in the process we struck up a correspondence. My sister Anne also began writing him, and over the years we sent him art supplies and money orders; she also sent him some nice food gifts that he sometimes received. He, in turn, sent us paintings and more paintings and letters and more letters still, boxes of them.

While on state, Jeffery corresponded with lots of others, often sending them watercolors. Bob Hope sent him $500 for a painting of him playing golf. Katherine Hepburn sent him a nice thank-you note for her watercolor (one day he pulled it out of a big bowl of letters and showed it to me), as did Mary Duke Biddle Semans for hers. He often asked Anne or me to find him addresses so he could write someone, and he asked for Fred Chappell’s address without having known that Ol’ Fred was my grad school mentor, early 1970s Greensboro. Jeffery had somehow found Fred’s short story “The Fishingest Woman,” read and enjoyed it, and sent him a watercolor so titled, a woman fly-fishing in a mountain stream; it hung in the Chappells’ Kensington Street home in Greensboro and is now in the Chappell papers (box 14) at Duke University. 

My wife, Elizabeth, and I visited him only once, at Caledonia, but since he’s returned to Martin County, where he lives only 40 minutes from us, I’ve enjoyed more regular visits and running errands with him. We both imagine that one day he might have his own car. But for now, he’s remote, getting to town a couple of times a week for a senior citizens luncheon by way of county van that’s available only for that occasional purpose. 

 In 2020, he had a show at the Putney Library in Putney, CT, thanks to Gordon Hayward, who with his wife Mary also has Reddick art on display at his Hayward Gardens. Gordon made remarks about Jeffery’s watercolors for the show’s opening and recently wrote to me: “I realized that his paintings enabled him to imagine the world outside prison and to therefore inhabit that outer world to a very helpful degree. What a remarkable man to find painting enabled him to survive the rigors and deprivations of prison life and now, there he is, free, and positive and painting, painting, painting!”

Norden Productions has produced this video on his work.

Our son, Silas, shot this short video to introduce Jefferey and the vast collection of art works that he’s created over these last 40+ years.

• • •

Jeffery & cats, Currituck CC, Maple, NC, 1998.

Convicted May 10, 1984 of burglary, auto and firearms larceny, and attempted assault, Jeffery was sentenced to life imprisonment under an especially harsh state law, the so-called Fair Sentencing Act, which mandated among other things life sentences for those convicted of one felony while committing another. Fair Sentencing was law from 1981 until 1994, but its repeal did not change circumstances for those already serving time under its sentencing structures. Governor Roy Cooper’s 2024 Executive Order 303 finally made his parole possible. 

He first served time in Raleigh at the NC State Prison, and subsequently at state correctional institutes in Franklin, Hyde, Currituck, and Pamlico counties and at Caledonia, in Tillery, and Eastern Correctional, in Maury.

On the back of this photo, at right, he addresses Elizabeth:

Here’re a few cats that I feed whenever I can. Now there’re only 2 cats. At night the black cat be tapping at my window. He surely knows who I am.

His many letters detail the varied ways prison authorities responded to his attempts to paint. Some forbade his receiving supplies, some sold him supplies at inflated prices. In some, it was impossible to know if money orders or supplies reached him, and he was transferred sometimes, it seemed, just to keep him bothered. He details those frustrations but keeps working with what he has at hand, marking off the days with art and correspondence to an unknown number of people.

Now, I bring him paintings from 30 years ago and he’s delighted to see what he did back then, and sometimes he re-works one to bring out its color again–he’s started brightening up some of his older linens with acrylics. Often when I bring him another load of paintings from those Anne and I had received from him over the years, he remarks at how good those early works actually were–which I knew, back in 1996, when I first saw a farm scene with horses, hanging in a mall.

–Alex Albright
30 April 2026

Deborah Griffin, news editor for the Williamston Enterprise, is taking a photo of Jeffery at SpringFest, April 11, 2026, in Williamston, where he almost sold a couple of watercolors.