Kurt  Jackson
The Cornish Seas From my kitchen window I look down over ten small fields, over their hedges of gorse and granite to the cliff tops and then out to the grey Atlantic to that line of bumps and smudges with the Isles of Scilly sitting on the skyline; the sea is near at hand. My studios are mainly in the fields around our small holding here on the edge of the Penwith moors but one small fisherman’s hut I have the use of, sits at the waters edge in a nearby cove with the doorway looking along the cliffs to Lands End. This is my most frequent stamping ground when tackling the coast as a subject for making work. (After all the sea is only one of many ways in which I engage with the natural world.) The huts sits within a cluster of similar vernacular sheds used by the local fishing community and their activity provides me with much of my subject matter as well as the many moods of the sea herself, the wildlife and flora, the geology, the history etc. Cornwall has more then 400 miles of coastline, it being nearly an island, only attached to England by the River Tamar’s shared riverbank. Along this coastline we have the UK’s most Southerly point on the Lizard and one of the most westerly points at Lands End and the Isles of Scilly in the far west. The two main coasts – the North and the South have differing characters, landscapes, geology and biodiversity. There are three seas – the Celtic sea, the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean (and the forth, the Bristol Channel if you want to be pedantic). And they all meet at Cape Cornwall near my fisherman’s hut. So, lots of diversity, lots to paint. Periodically we go away on ‘holiday’, dedicated painting trips, secluded holiday cottages around Cornwall, sometimes less then an hour door to door, but isolated spots; places for intense study and making. The idea is always to make a connection with the location, get to understand it, become immersed and intimate so that it enters the work, informs it, influences it, helps to make it; and changes me in the process of learning, discovering, experimenting. ‘The seascape’ has the potential of being an almost hackneyed clichéd reference – especially in a coastal artful much visited community like Cornwall; but I have no worries there. I am aware of my stresses and drive, my determined approach to get below the immediate prettiness of a ‘view’ to aim for something more gritty – I want the taste of the salt, the murmur and crash, the scent of ozone, the chough’s cheeky squeak, the fisherman’s curse, the cold fingertips, the face burnt by sun and wind. I need it all in my work. Kurt Jackson St Just, 2017.
Kurt Jackson the cornish seas text by
Charlotte Mullins
2017
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The brightening sea by Charlotte Mullins It takes five and a half hours to travel by train from the packed platforms of London Paddington to the picturesque seaside town of St Ives in West Cornwall. The city soon drops away and flat green fields cut through with canals and regiments of birch flash by. After an hour the landscape starts to open up, offering an expanding view of early crops, pools of brown water in ploughed ruts, white studs of cows and sheep. The occasional town asserts temporary geometries over natural contours, and lazy estuaries afford bobbing views of weekend boats and riverbanks. Suddenly you are rewarded with a flash of coastline, as the red cliffs and rolling silver sea of Dawlish Warren appear. The train speeds along the southern edge of England, waves breaking over the sea wall, salt crusting on the windows. And you are still less than halfway to the Penwith peninsula. As you travel further west and south, gorse springs up, gulls soar, palms grow tall among slate roofs and grass hunkers down in low tufts. The coastline you are heading for has attracted artists since the 1880s, when Whistler and Sickert made the journey and were rewarded with rugged wind-stripped moorland views, shallow luminescent bays and the sublimity of the Atlantic ocean. Now, if you are heading to St Ives – to meet an artist at Porthmeor studios perhaps, or to see the newly reopened Tate St Ives – you arrive on a two-carriage branch-line train that snakes along the Hayle estuary before curving around the broad yellow sands of Carbis Bay towards the lichen-covered roofs and narrow cobbled streets of St Ives. During the Second World War St Ives was home to Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, Bernard Leach and Naum Gabo, and later to Terry Frost, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham and Patrick Heron. However to visit Kurt Jackson – at his home, studio or recently opened Foundation and gallery – one must travel further still, taking the breathtaking coastal road that swings across the narrowing peninsula towards St Just, the last town before Land’s End. Patrick Heron vividly described this journey in 1955:
One must crawl up, down, round and along that incredible last lap of coast, where the lonely road slips, folds and slides round rocks, under crags, past lonely huddles of granite farms, past the mines of the past, along the ledge of green fields, small and emerald, which hangs, more or less horizontal, above the savage cathedral cliffs but below the horizontally streamlined, rock-strewn, mineand-fox-infested moors.1 Jackson first moved to Cornwall in 1984 with his wife Caroline, settling in Boscastle. In Cornwall: A Shell Guide the poet John Betjeman described the nearby village of Morwenstow as: ‘Here one is reaching not only the end of Cornwall but, it seems, the end of the world.’2 Jackson rented a converted stable and started to paint full-time. Five years later he plunged further into Cornwall, beyond the ‘end of the world’, and moved to St Just. Much of Jackson’s childhood was rooted in a Cornish sensibility, despite growing up on the outskirts of St Albans. Both his parents were artists, and his father’s abstract paintings came out of his time studying at the Bath Academy of Art in Corsham, where he was taught by William Scott, Peter Lanyon and Terry Frost. These painters had all lived and worked in St Ives – Lanyon had been born there in 1918 – and Jackson’s father would have seen the influence the region had on their work. Paintings by this generation of artists hung on the walls of the family home when Jackson was growing up, and Sven Berlin, an artist and writer associated with the St Ives school, was a family friend. When Kurt Jackson moved to Cornwall he became friendly with Karl Weschke – another artist associated with this circle – until his death in 2005. The approach of the St Ives School to the Cornish landscape was largely abstract, an interpretation of nature communicated
1 ‘Hills and Faces: Ivon Hitchens and Peter Lanyon’ in Patrick Heron, The Changing Forms of Art (London: Routledge, 1955) pp. 21–39 (38) 2 John Betjeman, Cornwall: A Shell Guide (London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 86
1 Sitting on the cliff top with the choughs. 2016/2017
mixed media on canvas 167 x 182 cms 653⁄4 x 715⁄8 ins
century artists who descended on Newlyn, attracted by the perceived authenticity or ‘primitivism’ of life at the country’s Celtic edges, the 1985 Tate exhibition positioned the St Ives School as connecting to the timelessness of nature, its cycles and rhythms, its patterns and colours. This followed Heron’s own analysis of his peers in articles for the New Statesman and Nation throughout the 1950s. Heron described Lanyon, for example, as someone who ‘always attempts to express a “total experience” of a landscape rather than a merely “visual experience” of it.’ Lanyon’s paintings, Heron explained, evoked ‘the total experience the body may have in walking over; climbing up into or down through; lying on, or sitting in a cave-rent, mine-ridden, road-orpath-threaded piece of Britain’s Celtic seaboard.’4 These words could have been written sixty years later to describe Jackson’s own approach to capturing the Penwith peninsula in paint.
2 The meeting. August 2015
mixed media on museum board 23 x 23 cms 9 x 9 ins
through shape, line and colour rather than literal representation. The energetic brushstrokes of Lanyon for example, his reduction of the landscape to gestural planes of colour, feels connected to Jackson’s birth as a painter. Jackson grew up imbibing the works of abstract painters who drew inspiration from the land, and the 1985 Tate exhibition ‘St Ives 1939–64: Twenty-five years of painting, sculpture and pottery’ was a key early influence for him. Alan Bowness, director of the Tate Gallery in the 1980s, wrote in the catalogue: ‘Here were abstract artists compelled by the landscape they inhabited to rethink their position vis-àvis the natural world.’3 The exhibition strove to connect each artist with the landscape they inhabited. Unlike the nineteenth
When Lanyon died in a gliding accident in 1964, W. S. Graham, a poet who counted Lanyon and other St Ives artists as friends, wrote an elegy entitled ‘The Thermal Stair’. The poem, addressed to the absent painter, recalled how Lanyon linked the poet and the artist’s interpretation of the landscape: You said once in the Engine House below Morvah That words make their world In the same way as the painter’s Mark surprises him Into seeing new 5 Poetry and painting both delve beyond rational syntax to conjure a richly textured and complex experience of place and time. In Jackson’s work there is a fusion of what Graham and Lanyon identified as the methods of the poet and the painter: words and marks. Jackson’s long titles often evoke the day he painted each
3 Alan Bowness, ‘Foreword’, in St Ives 1939–64: Twenty five years of painting, sculpture and pottery, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 1985), pp. 7–8 (8) 4 Heron 1955: 38 5 W. S. Graham, ‘The Thermal Stair’, from Collected Poems 1942–77, reprinted in St Ives 1939–64, exh. cat. (London: Tate, 1985), pp. 44–45 (44)
3 Scilly heat. 2010
mixed media on canvas 122 x 122 cms 48 x 48 ins
work, such as I can just hear a kestrel calling above the crash of the waves (2016) (no. 12) , and he acknowledges that the textual additions he makes to each painting could be read as poetry. To mark his 50th birthday in 2011 Jackson published a small volume of his own poems and increasingly the notes scrawled onto the surface of particular paintings are transcribed on to gallery walls as concrete poems during his exhibitions.6 Jackson’s poem ‘Graham’s Cove’ (2010) was inspired by a radio broadcast of W. S. Graham’s poem ‘The Nightfishing’ (1955), and in it Jackson repeats Graham’s ‘Far out faintly calls / The continual sea’, weaving the lines into a vivid description of the sounds that surround him while painting in the shadow of Cape Cornwall.7 Poets have long been inspired by the Penwith peninsula, with what the writer and poet Adrian Stokes – another St Ives resident – described as the changeable ‘brightening sea’.8 They have been drawn to the same liminal spaces as Jackson – the horizon marking the interface of earth and sky; the coastal edge of land and sea, what Seamus Heaney called ‘the firm margin’.9 Jackson admires the poetry of Heaney and you can understand why – the physical sense of being ‘in’ the Irish landscape that Heaney’s poems evoke, poems of the land’s ancient history and its unflinching, uncompromising, enduring strength. The tip of Cornwall provides Jackson with a similarly rugged and historically rich source. Jackson paints outdoors, physically ‘in’ the landscape, more days than not, often from a small fisherman’s hut built into the cliff-face at Priest Cove near St Just. The firm margin is his starting point, the rocks of the cove or the sandy edge of nearby beaches represented by gestural, impastoed lower peripheries in his paintings, as in Cove Notes (2016) (no. 28). Above, malachite waves flecked with winter foam crash down and splash paint over paint. At times collaged
netting or other flotsam appear, as in Evening Sets (2016) (no. 4), the painting’s surface encrusted like a rock covered in barnacles. Gradations of blue fade to the distant horizon, marked by a sunburst in Sitting on the cliff top with the choughs (2016–17) (no. 1), or a sheet of rain in Rain comes in with the tide (2016) (no. 15), blurring the boundary between timeless sea and fleeting sky. Jackson enjoys painting the sea in winter, when the waves crash against the rocks and the sky goes blue-black with storm clouds. His former foreshore studio was a cave further around the cove and the waves would black out the light as they crashed against the cave entrance, threatening to engulf him. It became too dangerous to paint there so the local fishermen helped him repair a derelict hut and he can now retreat there if the weather becomes too extreme. It is barely big enough to stand up in, only a few feet wide, and he shares it with nesting wrens and robins, inquisitive shrews and nocturnal rats. Several substantial ferns sprout between the stones of one wall and the wind screams across the corrugated roof. It is rudimentary to say the least, but you sense Jackson wouldn’t have it any other way. From his vantage point in the cove, Land’s End appears as a lowslung promontory on the horizon, visible in Big Silver Sea, Land’s End (2015) (no. 18) and Land’s End. Roar, rumble rush (2015) (no. 52). Humphrey Davy, a Cornish chemist who invented the Davy lamp in 1815, wrote of the power of the sea on this stretch of the coast: … On the sea The sunbeams tremble and the purple light Illumes the dark Bolerium, seat of storms! Dear are his granite wilds, his schistine rocks Encirled by the waves, where to the gale
6 Kurt Jackson, and (Falmouth: Falmouth Art Gallery, 2011). In the exhibition ‘Bees (and the odd wasp) in my bonnet’ the poem ‘Bombus and Hyacinth’ (2014) appeared on the gallery wall. This poem can be found in A Kurt Jackson Bestiary (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2015) p. 57 7 Kurt Jackson, and (Falmouth: Falmouth Art Gallery, 2011), pp 50-51 8 Adrian Stokes ‘West Penwith’, in With all the views: the collected poems of Adrian Stokes (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1981) p. 33 9 From ‘Shore Woman’ in Seamus Heaney: Selected Poems 1965–1975 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980), pp. 86–87 (86)
4 Evening sets. 2016
mixed media and collage on canvas 122 x 122 cms 48 x 48 ins
Jackson paints in many different locations in Cornwall, renting cottages so he can embed himself in the landscape: drink in the different colours, register the change in birdsong, smell the distinct flora. Often this goes unacknowledged in his titles and is only revealed by the change in atmospheric conditions or the new colours of sea, sand and rocks in the paintings. The seas that surround Cornwall may be Jackson’s muse but it is the effects of light and weather on their shifting flanks – how the sun illuminates a wave crest or pools on the horizon or how rain obliterates a view or splatters his canvas – that excites and inspires him. John Wells, another painter based in St Ives during the 1940s, wrote of the difficulty in capturing this mutability in a letter to Sven Berlin:
5 Marazion tideline still life. June 2015
mixed media on museum board 23 x 21 cms 9 x 81⁄8 ins
The haggard cormorant shrieks, and, far beyond Where the great ocean mingles with the sky, Behold the cloud-like islands, grey in mist. 10 You can almost imagine the young chemist sitting alongside Jackson in the lee of the hut, both men admiring the fierce grandeur of centuries of storms as they break over the far promontory, the rocky outcrop of The Brisons wreathed in mist a mile offshore before them.
How can one paint the warmth of the sun, the sound of the sea, the journey of a beetle across a rock, or thoughts of one’s own whence and whither? That’s one argument for abstraction. One absorbs all these feelings and ideas: if one is lucky they undergo an alchemistic transformation into gold and that is creative work.11 Wells was an abstract painter whose geometric compositions sprang from organic forms such as shells, pebbles and waves. Jackson’s work can veer close to abstraction as in the serene Pale Low Water (2013) (no. 51) , its colours reminiscent of Richard Diebenkorn’s distillations of Pacific light in his ‘Ocean Park’ series rather than Wells’ earth-bound palette. Jackson’s approach eschews geometry, however, and the splashes and flicks of paint in Distant Lands End, Thunder and Roar, Gales at High Water (2015) (no. 10) for example, its sky dashed in then scratched, reveal a more instinctive, gestural approach. Jackson can often be found hunched over canvases pinned out on the rocks or balancing on the roof of his coastal hut, brushes in hand. Surfaces can become thick with impasto as in February Cove
10 From ‘Extract from an unfinished poem on Mount’s Bay’, reproduced by John Ayrton Paris in The Life of Sir Humphry Davy, Volume 1, (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831) pp. 36–39 (37) 11 Quoted by Sven Berlin in ‘An aspect of creative art in Cornwall’, Facet, vol III, no. 1 (winter 1948–49), reproduced in Tom Cross, Painting the Warmth of the Sun: St Ives Artists 1939–1975 (Guildford: Lutterworth Press, 1984) p. 200
6 6pm Cape slipway. April 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235⁄8 x 235⁄8 ins
An ecology of interlocking worlds and times – how can this all be put on one page; captured and celebrated, noted and described? Ink, pastel, crayon, pencil, glue, gouache, acrylic, watercolour and collage; an eclectic diversity – a desperate scramble and scrabble to attempt to reign in this diversity around me, into and onto my page.12 Jackson’s observation also points to another overriding concern of his, the ecological aspect of his work. His concern for the anthropocene changes to the climate and his passionate environmental beliefs, as well as his ongoing zoological interests, underpin his relentless study of and response to nature.
7 Sea pinks and dandelions, May bank holiday. 2014
mixed media on museum board 19 x 20 cms 7 1⁄2 x 77⁄8 ins
(2015) (no. 16) or smeared with greens, ochres, whites and greys as in Cornish Winter High Water (2017) (no. 9). While many of Jackson’s works, particularly those in this exhibition, can be read as near-abstract, they have all been refracted through the prism of the view as Jackson tries to encapsulate the world he experiences around him. This world of Jackson’s is not purely visual – in these paintings he is trying to capture what the Cornish call ‘mordros’, the sound of the sea. Beyond this, he wants us to taste and smell it too, to hear its call, to feel the salt on our skin and the wind in our hair, the burn of the sun on our face, a connection deep in our bones that once spliced our ancestors to the land and the sea. Jackson, like Wells, queried how this can be done:
Jackson’s life has been dedicated to environmental issues, from his work with Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to reducing his own carbon footprint by installing a wind turbine and heat pumps at his own home. He has been Glastonbury’s artistin-residence for nearly twenty years, his paintings of festivalgoers auctioned for Oxfam, Greenpeace and WaterAid, and he is regularly involved with ecological projects, most recently Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s campaign concerning the level of plastics in the sea. George Monbiot, the polemical environmental commentator who published How Did We Get Into This Mess? in 2016, has written on Jackson’s work. As Monbiot says, ‘nothing human beings do, and nothing that takes place in the natural world, occurs in isolation … everything is connected.’13 Jackson’s work reflects this belief, from his use of beach flotsam in collages to his quiet still lifes of coastal flowers arranged in washed-up Carlsberg cans and ketchup bottles. His awareness of mankind’s responsibility for and exploitation of the natural world has been instrumental in shaping his latest and most ambitious project to date – the opening of his own gallery, the Kurt Jackson Foundation, in St Just in 2015.
12 Kurt Jackson, in Kurt Jackson Sketchbooks, by Alan Livingston and Kurt Jackson (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2012), chapter 2, ‘Cornish Coast’, pp. 34-45 (36) 13 George Monbiot, How Did We Get Into This Mess?: Politics, Equality, Nature (London: Verso, 2017), p. 79
The Jackson Foundation was created by Kurt and Caroline as an environmentally informed arts space. Managed by one of Jackson’s daughters, Zinzi, and her husband Fynn, it has one foot in the town and one in the landscape. The gallery is a short walk from the main square in St Just but on entering the cavernous space you are drawn towards rolling green fields framed by the gallery’s far windows. A former garage and store owned by local bakery Warren’s, it is now a carbon-neutral conversion with polished concrete floors and soaring white walls. A large central gallery is flanked by two smaller spaces, one of which shows films and documentaries connected with the works on display. Upstairs, exhibitions by charities related to the main show run concurrently. The rolling programme is devised by Kurt and Caroline; a previous exhibition of Jackson’s work, ‘Obsession: following the surfer’ (2016) ran alongside a display by Surfers Against Sewage, and sales and related events raised enough money for the charity to employ a new education officer. Jackson describes this variously as contributing to the community, reflecting his family’s politics and of finding new ways to do things: ‘It is a gallery with an environmental agenda,’ he says. ‘It is about my work and about collaborating with other people and other organizations.’14 The exhibition at the gallery this summer is ‘Bees (and the odd wasp) in my bonnet’, which has transferred from the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where it was seen by over 100,000 people.15 At St Just it was opened by Michael Eavis, founder of the Glastonbury festival and patron of the B4 Project (Bringing Back Black Bees). The paintings range from bumblebees tumbling over coastal heather to suburban honeybees buzzing around a car park, hives in the Isles of Scilly and carefully observed studies of wasps. Quite a few of the paintings, prints and studies from this show also appeared in his 2015 Bestiary, a secular contemporary take on the religious medieval anthologies of animals real and imagined.
Jackson’s Bestiary was the culmination of thirty years of interest in the diversity of life on our planet. Jackson met his wife Caroline while studying Zoology at Oxford University, and still has boxes of insects he collected and neatly labelled as a young boy. Perhaps as a way of forming his own identity as a teenager, in contrast to the abstract art made by his parents, Jackson’s first forays into art were careful watercolour studies of these creatures – bees and moths and beetles, all accompanied by written notes arranged around the edges. Jackson’s mature style may well have become freer and more expressive but he has retained the note-making and careful observation of flora and fauna that he developed as a boy. For example, on a 2015 trip to the Isles of Scilly he bought several crabs from the only fisherman on the tiny island of St Agnes, painting them on the kitchen table before they were prepared for dinner (The Meeting, 2015 (no. 2) ). When his car had to be repaired in Penzance he sat on the nearby foreshore and spent the day painting wild daisies in a makeshift vase of a salvaged beer can ( Marazion Tideline Still Life, 2015 (no. 5) ). Jackson is an artist fascinated with both the natural world he finds around him on any given day and with a broader, deeper sense of geological time, the cycles of nature and mankind’s relationship with the environment. Paintings carry titles such as The sun comes out, the sun goes in, the tide goes out, the tide comes in (2017) (no. 13) , suggesting they are rooted in his experiences of watching, looking, feeling and experiencing life on the firm margin, looking out at the brightening sea, over significant periods of time. I imagine he is out there right now, in the doorway of his hut, brush held squarely to the horizon, choughs hopping around his paint-splattered boots, looking at and thinking about and painting the sea’s vastness. Charlotte Mullins Writer and art critic
14 Kurt Jackson in conversation with the author, 21 March 2017 15 The exhibition was at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, 18 March – 29 September 2016. It transferred to the Jackson Foundation, St Just, 25 March – 19 August 2017
The last wilderness
photograph © Seth Jackson
Kurt Jackson by Charlotte Mullins in conversation Charlotte Mullins Your latest body of work includes many paintings of the sea. You paint on the coastal edge, often from a fisherman’s hut at Priest Cove near St Just, where you live and work.
CM In this exhibition there is more sea and less coastline, as if you are striving to capture something more essential, more elemental.
Kurt Jackson I am not a maritime painter, it is not about the seascape, it is about more than that. Sometimes I am interested in the foreshore and what is living down there, or it could be what is living up by the hut, or it could be how the fishermen are working the cove and using it. It could be the tourists, how they do their own thing on the beach, or it could be about the elements, the light on the ocean, the tidal shift, the diurnal and nocturnal changes. There are so many ways of looking at it. Often it could be an anonymous piece of sea I am using; at other times it is a definite place in Penwith.
KJ We live in an overcrowded world – I often feel that the sea is the last wilderness. We know we have completely changed it beneath the surface: the depleted fish stocks, the acidity of the water, we have changed the direction of winds and rainfall. However, at the end of the day, visually, the sea does its own thing. I think that is really important for us to come and stare at these places and recharge our heads, there’s some sort of ancestral need to do this. It is a very healthy thing to do, to spend time in big open places and stare at skylines and horizons.
KJ Yes, but I never become blasé about it. It is where I feel comfortable painting. Your ultimate contentedness is down to whether a painting is working or not, so obviously sometimes you have a lot of angst, a lot of frustration, but the situation makes me feel that I am in the right place. CM Many of these new works seem to veer towards abstraction. They are stripped of coastal markers and people; the emphasis is on the horizontals – the sky meeting the sea, the rocky foreshore, the stripes of wave sets. KJ People have often said that if you take the skyline out of my seascapes or landscapes then you are left with an abstract image, planes and lines. I love the skyline, and how you move that up and down in a composition. I love that divide, although sometimes it is more a merging, a smudging. I enjoy painting the winters more because the colour is reduced, it is not about prettiness – aquamarine can be dangerous at times. CM There are only a few works in this series that feature a bright blue palette – Cornish Indian Summer (2016) (no. 44) , for example, or the 2010 painting Scilly Heat (no. 3) . KJ Yes, most are gun-metal greys, slate greys. I enjoy that more. CM The surface has always been very present, very visible, in your work. In Chough Squeak, Wave Crash. Hectic (2016) (no. 38) for example, it has a vigorous surface, dripping with paint, but there is still space for the viewer to enter, to escape into. You maintain tension between surface and depth. KJ There is always a relationship between painting and picture. It is not just about the subject matter – the topography, the view. It is often as much about putting one colour next to another
photograph © Seth Jackson
CM To be inspired by nature’s power. The hut you rent at Priest Cove is very exposed to the elements but you work there most days.
or creating a texture or a surface that is pleasurable. It is an investigative process, an experiment, seeing what works and what happens. I am enjoying that side of it – that is the painting as opposed to the picture. One is about trying to somehow replicate what you are looking at, or feeling or hearing, and one is just about the paint. Somehow I try and get it all to work. I am aware that I use repeating marks to try and create the musculature and substance of what I am looking at. Those marks are often like tangled lines or a series of dots, which could be a net or a network, or an entanglement. I am also trying to suggest what I call a wilderness, nature doing its own thing, whether that is looking into the bottom of a bush or looking into the sea or looking at the sky and the clouds moving. It is something to do with the rhythms of nature that exist without us having our hand in it. CM In Hot Low Tide, Cornwall (2016) (no. 20) and Chough Squeak, Wave Crash. Hectic (2016) (no. 38) there are dense tangles of lines in the foreground. It is as much Jackson Pollock as it is seaweed, rocks and sea. KJ Exactly, so on one level it is representational and suggests something but on another level it is something else, a language to describe a feeling of myself about this place. I have no problem
KJ My father was of that Fifties–Sixties generation, and his contemporaries and mates were all part of that scene as well, so I experienced all that in the family home. Day trips were to their studios and to dinners in their homes, as well as going to galleries and things. I loved it, loved it all. But at the time I was more interested in natural history, the outdoors – I spent all my time wandering around woods and hedgerows, collecting and identifying, with my mates. There were about twelve of us and that is all we did: bird watching, identifying wild flowers, collecting tadpoles. When I now look at my teenage insect collection it is about understanding the world. I gained an immense amount of knowledge in my youth that I still use: identification skills, ecology, undertstanding how things fit together. I still find it so exciting and extraordinary how many different creatures and plants coexist in one place. To understand that you have to be able to identify all the different elements in that jigsaw before you can understand how they all fit together.
where an individual piece of my work is placed on the spectrum that stretches from photorealism to pure abstraction. To me there is no pigeonholing any of it. Sometimes my attention is turned to a specific detail that leads to exact reproduction, but often it is a focal point within a painting, so moving away from the thing that has really grabbed me the painting might get looser and more gestural. CM That freedom to paint exactly as you like, is that a benefit of not having gone to art school? You have never studied art formally. KJ I think I realized that years ago, that I was really lucky not to have been pushed into an ‘ism’ or a school, and I have found my own path. I am very fortunate in that way. CM As a teenager you collected insects and made watercolour studies of them. Art served a purpose for you, it documented your passion for the natural world. However, when you went to Oxford University to study Zoology, you quickly realized you wanted to be a painter and you moved to Cornwall shortly after graduating. Was it at this point, or earlier, that you thought I don’t want to paint insects, I want to paint the land?
CM When you moved to North Cornwall, to Boscastle, in 1984, you started painting full time. Did you know of the St Ives school by then, of the history of artists painting the land in Cornwall?
CM But you were driven to keep going? KJ I felt I had to do it. CM You are self-taught in as much as you didn’t go to art school, but both your parents were artists and you grew up surrounded by art.
photograph © Caroline Jackson
KJ It was a gradual evolution. At Oxford – when I was painting when I should have been studying – and in the early years of living in North Cornwall, I was just trying to work out how to paint and what I wanted to paint and how to go about it. To some extent it is always a process of discovery and experimentation, but back then I don’t think I knew what I was doing at all.
KJ Yes, I knew the artists from the Fifties and Sixties through my parents, and I knew a lot of the next generation as well. My father was part of that scene. I grew up being aware of all these artists, some of them as friends of the family. Then in the 1980s I used to show with the Penwith Society in St Ives, and with the Newlyn Society of Artists, where I was chairman for many years. CM You have lived in Cornwall for over thirty years and continue to explore the Cornish landscape, its wild oceans and seas, flora and fauna. KJ I think I am just very hungry to bring in this world around me, to capture it, to celebrate it. Why it is glorious is that you never know what is going to happen, you know you are always going to have some form of glorious experience, you are always going to learn something, discover something, but you don’t know what you are going to make or do or whether it will be any good. That is what is really nice, that unknown nature of what you do. You don’t know how the day will end; it’s not completely in your hands. It should be but it is not. There are all sorts of things going on. It is partly because I allow the external, the world, to collide with me when making the work en plein air, and I like that unknown chance encounter, that accident, that room for experiment. But also I never know how I am going to respond or react. That is the case when I am working at the hut or in the studio. CM Do you feel a connection to the artists who moved to Cornwall in the nineteenth century to paint en plein air? KJ The reality is now I am probably sixty per cent en plein air, forty per cent in the studio. But everything I make in the studio comes from that experience out there; it couldn’t happen without it. By contrast a lot of the Newlyn School artists who descended on the area in the nineteenth century didn’t have a real connection to the world they were painting. There was a class problem – they couldn’t relate to their subjects and their subjects couldn’t relate to them, and they didn’t really understand what
was going on, how those people were making a living. You can see that in the mistakes that are in the Newlyn School paintings. I’ve had them pointed out to me by fishermen, and some of them are fundamental – you have boats with sails on when they are using a net you wouldn’t use with a sail; things like that. The point is by not understanding or having a real sympathy with their subject, the class or the way of life, I think they were divorced from it, there was something missing. There is some beautiful painting there, but I think there was a barrier. I don’t want this to happen in my work, so whether I am painting a plant or a fisherman I want to know and understand everything. CM When you are painting the sea, do you always work on a large scale? KJ Every day is different, every time. Sometimes I work in sketchbooks, or on a series of tiny studies or sometimes on one big piece. Even if I do a big piece I will also do something in my sketchbook as well, a sort of pictorial diary. Often something in the painting won’t work, or it will be destroyed or painted over, and then you always have your sketchbook to remind you of that day, that moment, but also so you feel as if you have got something out of that day, something tangible. CM Do you know if a painting is working while you are doing it? KJ Yes. CM You can feel it? KJ It can be so many things. It can be down to your energy levels or it can be that you have chosen a challenging composition or angle so it is going to be hard to make it work. Sometimes you are just not content with what you are doing. When I paint I swear an incredible amount, the worst language! Caroline and the kids are completely used to it but if I am in amongst the general public at Glastonbury or at the hut and there are people nearby I find it restricting because I can’t be myself. When I paint
photograph © Seth Jackson
I need to be myself, to chuck paint around, to make a complete mess; when people look at me when I paint, even just a glance, it affects me. As soon as I stop making that gestural mark that I want to make the painting is a compromise. CM There are a few paintings in this exhibition that centre on sunlight reflecting on the sea, such as Winter Solstice (2016) (no. 58) and Climb Down the Cliffs, at Dusk (2016) (no. 45) . I can’t help thinking of Turner when I look at these. KJ Last year I had a show at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter where I looked at Turner.1 This complete reappraisal of Turner has been really important and fascinating for me. I suppose like any contemporary artist who responds to the natural world you are going to acknowledge Turner’s existence or influence in some way. I’ve always given a nod and a wink but that was it. However for this show I went to specific places and found the exact place Turner made his drawings. I put myself right there. Sometimes I had vertigo on the edge of a cliff, or would look at the same view he had sketched and be amazed by what he had come up with in a short space of time.
It really opened my eyes to those places, some of them were so challenging: at Land’s End Turner went right out on the edge of the last boulder on the cliff and painted watercolours there. So that process was important to me. I wasn’t trying to make a Turner painting, I was trying to respond to the places he had seen. In actual fact my body of work was as much about that as what has happened to those places since and why. CM We also need to mention Constable in relation to your work. The skies you paint are often heavy with rain clouds, fat brushstrokes of grey shadowing white tops, as if – like Constable – you are trying to capture the transient conditions of the skies. KJ I have just started another project called ‘My Father’s River’ about the river Stour in East Anglia. Everyone thinks of that as Constable country, but for me it is also the river where my father swims. He is in his eighties and still cycles to the river to swim. So I have started doing a series of paintings following the river and getting to know it. CM Will it be a ‘source to the mouth’ series, like ‘The Thames Project’ (2006)?
1 ‘Kurt Jackson: Revisiting Turner’s Tourism’, 10 September – 4 December 2016. This show will transfer to the Jackson Foundation in 2018.
KJ Probably. CM So you may have to take on Constable’s Flatford Mill. KJ I will do. Flatford Mill is only four miles from my father’s house, and it is now a field studies centre. You can go there and learn about the dragonflies of Britain. Visitors must be aware of Constable but that is not the reason they are going there, they are going to study the wetland habitat and the wildlife. You can hire a rowing boat and go down through that stretch in the river; maybe I will take my canoe. CM When I was thinking of Constable in terms of your work I was thinking of his cloud studies, of him trying to capture the transitory cloudscapes above Hampstead Heath. KJ Turner’s colour studies and Constable’s clouds, neither were meant for public consumption, but both were shattering, revolutionary. They set the ball rolling. CM Do you feel this weight of the history of landscape painting when you work? KJ No, not at all. I am aware of it, and I am aware that when I was doing it in my twenties and early thirties I was doing something deeply unfashionable and it wouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone. Thankfully times have changed. It didn’t stop me doing it – as you know, I do what I do! – but it did bother me. CM Do you feel a connection with contemporary landscape painters instead? I am thinking of Anselm Kiefer for example. His work is freighted with history; unlike you he seems at war with the landscape, but he has a very physical approach to painting the natural world as you do. KJ Yes, there seems to be a darkness, almost a negativity, running through Kiefer’s work. There’s not a whole heap of celebration of life in it, as it often refers to the darkness of past
deeds, but he is magnificent in how he makes a painting or a sculpture. That physicality, what I call heavy collage, is fantastic. CM Your work has its own political undertones because of the environmental concerns that underpin it, but it doesn’t have Kiefer’s darkness. Do you want to inspire us to be more responsible for our planet by showing us its beauty and diversity? KJ Definitely. There are incredible depths and levels of content to Kiefer’s work. I also want there to be different levels of content in my work, that you can engage with. CM Perhaps it is like the sublime. The sublime can be terrifying, or it can be uplifting and awe-inspiring. It has the same root but there are different ways of presenting it. Does nature ever thwart you or overpower you? KJ Sometimes if I am working away, on one of my Scottish trips for example, and I want to make a big work and the weather is stormy all week it really is a bloody battle, trying to paint in the rain and wind. CM Is this the benefit of constantly returning to the Cornish landscape? You can go out into nature everyday and adapt accordingly. You can capture all those different moments without feeling pressured that you have to paint in a particular way? KJ Sure, but there are different pressures. I am painting a series of works for a show at the gallery [the Jackson Foundation in St Just] this winter, and I want to paint the autumn and winter colours in a nearby valley. Spring is just breaking through now, and in a matter of weeks that palette is going to change completely. So at the moment I want to paint a really big painting down there and I can feel the pressure is on but I can’t do it because it is really exposed on that valley side. I can’t do it until the weather lets me. Charlotte Mullins Writer and art critic
March 2017
8 Pretty boulders. 2016
mixed media and collage on canvas 92 x 92 cms 36 x 36 ins
9 Cornish winter high water. 2017
mixed media on canvas 122 x 122 cms 48 x 48 ins
10 Distant lands end, thunder and roar, gales at high water. April 2015
mixed media on museum board 20 x 22 cms 7 7⁄8 x 81⁄2 ins
11 The tide, inching its way closer. May 2014
mixed media on museum board 32 x 33 cms 123⁄8 x 13 ins
12 I can just hear a kestrel calling above the crash of the waves. 2016
mixed media and collage on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235â „8 x 235â „8 ins
13 The sun comes out, the sun goes in, the tide goes out, the tide comes in. 2017
mixed media and collage on wood panel 122 x 122 cms 48 x 48 ins
14 The tide goes out, the tide comes in, the waves fold onto the sands. May 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235â „8 x 235â „8 ins
15 Rain comes in with the tide. April 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235⁄8 x 235⁄8 ins
16 February cove. 2015
mixed media on canvas 92 x 92 cms 36 x 36 ins
17 Cornish headlands. May 2016
18 Big silver sea. Lands End. April 2015
mixed media on museum board 19 x 22 cms 71⁄2 x 8 5⁄8 ins
mixed media on museum board 23 x 23 cms 9 x 9 ins
19 Lundy is out there, the sun breaks through. April 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235⁄8 x 235⁄8 ins
20 Hot low tide, Cornwall. May 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235⁄8 x 235⁄8 ins
21 Life feels pretty good this morning. May 2015
mixed media on wood panel 61 x 61 cms 24 x 24 ins
22 Gannet, chough, raven. 2016
mixed media and collage on canvas 92 x 92 cms 36 x 36 ins
23 Sundowner, Annet, Scilly., August 2015
24 A school of porpoises off Beady Pool, St Agnes, Scilly. September 2014
mixed media on museum board 26 x 24 cms 10 x 91⁄2 ins
mixed media on museum board 20 x 20 cms 75⁄8 x 77⁄8 ins
25 Tide on the turn, a still morning. May 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235â „8 x 235â „8 ins
26 Misty Long Rock. I sat here as a 14 year old and ate a pasty. June 2015
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235â „8 x 235â „8 ins
27 The pipits run along the tide line. The sand blows across the beach. May 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235â „8 x 235â „8 ins
28 Cove notes. 2016
mixed media and collage on canvas 92 x 92 cms 36 x 36 ins
29 Just one small boat. April 2014
30 Western rocks off St Agnes, passing fisherman. August 2013
mixed media on museum board 21 x 22 cms 81⁄8 x 81⁄2 ins
mixed media on museum board 22 x 22 cms 85⁄8 x 85⁄8 ins
31 Big dog with red ball at low water. May 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235⁄8 x 235⁄8 ins
32 At high water the sun appears and it reverts back to summer. October 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235â „8 x 235â „8 ins
33 A Point of balance. Autumn equinox, tide on the turn. September 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235⁄8 x 235⁄8 ins
34 Cloud shadows, wave shadows. 2016
mixed media and collage on museum board 66 x 82 cms 26 x 321â „4 ins
35 Kids on a rock. April 2015
36 Self-portrait with the oyster catchers, pipits and wagtails. June 2015
mixed media on museum board 18 x 23 cms 71⁄8 x 9 ins
mixed media on museum board 24 x 25 cms 91⁄4 x 9 7⁄8 ins
37 Rain over a big sea. January 2015
mixed media and collage on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235⁄8 x 235⁄8 ins
38 Chough squeak, wave crash. hectic. 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235⁄8 x 235⁄8 ins
39 Rock pool swimmer. October 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235⁄8 x 235⁄8 ins
40 Sunshine on a rainy day. 2016
mixed media and collage on museum board 68 x 80 cms 26 3â „4 x 311â „2 ins
41 Distant headlands. Big sea and a little sunlight. 2014
42 The tide slowly creeps up over the slate foreshore. Starfish and anemones. May 2014
mixed media on museum board 20 x 20 cms 77⁄8 x 77⁄8 ins
mixed media on museum board 21 x 23 cms 81⁄4 x 9 ins
43 Low tide is musseling time. April 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235â „8 x 235â „8 ins
44 Cornish Indian Summer. September 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235⁄8 x 235⁄8 ins
45 Climb down the cliffs at dusk. October 2016
mixed media on wood panel 60 x 60 cms 235⁄8 x 235⁄8 ins
46 Sun, rain, sun. Towards Lands End. 2016
mixed media on paper 57 x 76 cms 221⁄2 x 297⁄8 ins
47 Eastern Isles from Tresco. June 2014
mixed media on museum board 17 x 20 cms 61⁄2 x 7 5⁄8 ins
48 Scilly grasshopper song. August 2015
mixed media on museum board 15 x 31 cms 53⁄4 x 121⁄4 ins
49 Big storms, Carn Gloose Cliff. February 2016
mixed media on paper 57 x 60 cms 221⁄2 x 235⁄8 ins
50 A lazy murmur drops to a whisper. May 2016
mixed media on paper 57 x 62 cms 221⁄2 x 243⁄8 ins
51 Pale low water. May 2013
mixed media on museum board 58 x 58 cms 227⁄8 x 227⁄8 ins
52 Lands End. Roar, rumble, rush. March 2015
mixed media on paper 57 x 61 cms 221â „2 x 24 ins
53 Tansy, corn marigold, yarrow. St Agnes, Scilly. August 2015
54 Ox-eye daisies and kidney vetch. May 2016
mixed media on museum board 21 x 16 cms 81⁄8 x 61⁄4 ins
mixed media on museum board 24 x 23 cms 91⁄2 x 9 ins
55 Littoral. Last night’s storm still surges and rolls out there. March 2016
mixed media on paper 57 x 61 cms 221â „2 x 24 ins
56 Late afternoon shorebreak. May 2016
mixed media on paper 57 x 61 cms 221â „2 x 24 ins
57 Hawker’s Cove. The Camel. May 2014
mixed media on museum board 53 x 56 cms 207⁄8 x 22 ins
58 Winter solstice. 2016
mixed media on collage 122 x 122 cms 48 x 48 ins
59 Shorebreak. May 2015
mixed media on museum board 22 x 23 cms 85â „8 x 9 ins
60 Porthbean to Nare Head, flowing tide. March 2012
mixed media on paper 56 x 60 cms 22 x 235â „8 ins
61 Gulls, 2017
62 Boy and dog. 2017
bronze unique on oak base h 20 x w 25 x d 11 cms h 7 7⁄8 x w 97⁄8 x d 43⁄8 ins
bronze unique on oak base h 32 x w 23 x d 11 cms h 125⁄8 x w 9 x d 43⁄8 ins
63 Floats and flags. 2017
bronze unique on oak base h 22 x w 31 x d 12 cms h 85⁄8 x w 121⁄4 x d 43⁄4 ins
64 Mr and Mrs Fisher. 2017
65 In the net. 2017
bronze unique on oak base h 34 x w 23 x d 11 cms h 133⁄8 x w 9 x d 43⁄8 ins
bronze unique on oak base h 30 x w 23 x d 11 cms h 113⁄4 x w 9 x d 43⁄8 ins
Recent Selected Solo Exhibitions and Events For the last 35 years Kurt Jackson has been exhibiting internationally and nationally in both commercial and public art spaces. For a full cv and bibliography see www.kurtjackson.com
2016
2015
‘Kurt Jackson, ‘Obsession, Following the Surfer’, Jackson
‘Place’, Victoria Art Gallery, Bath.
Foundation, St Just. ‘Kurt Jackson, Revisiting Turner’s Tourism’, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. ‘Continental’, Campden Gallery, Gloucestershire. Invited Artist, Paisley Art Institute, Glasgow. ‘Bees [and the odd wasp] in my Bonnet’, University of Oxford, Museum of Natural History.
‘The Broccoli Juggler’, sculpture Penlee Gardens, Penzance. ‘A Cornish Bestiary’, Redfern Gallery Cork Street, London. ‘From Here’, Jackson Foundation, St Just, Cornwall. ‘Forage’, Campden Gallery, Gloucestershire. ‘The Liffey’, Origin Gallery, Dublin. ‘Place’, Royal Cornwall Museum, Truro.
Biography Kurt Jackson MA (Oxon) DLitt (Hon) RWA was born is 1961 in Blandford, Dorset. He graduated from St Peter’s College, Oxford with a degree in Zoology in 1983. While there, he spent most of his time painting and attending courses at Ruskin College of Art, Oxford. On gaining his degree he travelled extensively and independently, painting wherever he went. He travelled to the Arctic alone and across Africa with his wife, Caroline. They moved to Cornwall in 1984 where they still live and work. They have three grown children, Seth, Zinzi and Chloe and four young grandchildren. A dedication to and celebration of the environment is intrinsic to both his politics and his art and a holistic involvement with photograph © Caroline Jackson
his subjects provides the springboard for his formal innovations. Jackson’s practice involves both plein air and studio work and embraces an extensive range of materials and techniques including mixed media, large canvases, print making, sculpture and the written word. Over the past thirty years Jackson has had numerous art publications released to accompany his exhibitions. Jackson regularly contributes to radio and television and presents environmentally informed art documentaries for the BBC.
He has been Artist in Residence on the Greenpeace ship Esperanza, at the Eden Project and at Glastonbury Festival
In 2015 the Jackson Foundation Gallery was launched by
since 1999. He has an Honorary Doctorate (DLitt) from Exeter
Kurt and Caroline, a new ambitious art space situated in the
University and is an Honorary Fellow of St Peter’s College, Oxford
centre of St Just, Britain’s most westerly town. This foundation
University. He is an ambassador for Survival International and
essentially exhibits Kurt Jackson’s work, usually in collaboration
frequently works with Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, WaterAid,
with national and locally based NGOs and charities in the
Oxfam and Cornwall Wildlife Trust. He is an academician at the
environmental sector.
Royal West of England Academy.
The Jackson Foundation The Jackson Foundation is an exciting new independent gallery space created by Kurt and Caroline Jackson, based in a large ex-industrial building in the centre of St Just in Penwith, West Cornwall. The gallery is essentially an environmentally informed arts space photograph © Fynn Tucker
– a unique Cornish foundation that consists of a large dynamic exhibition space, working with national and locally based NGOs and charities in the environmental sector – all sustained and supported by the work of Kurt Jackson. With a desire to invest in the future potential of this part of the world and put their ‘politics’ into action Kurt and Caroline Jackson have built a carbon neutral green build/conversion using
Kurt Jackson’s work has a national and international following
renewables and sensitive local materials and local labour.
and by placing the Gallery in St Just a new link in the Art Loop has been created in Penwith: St Ives, St Just, Newlyn and
The Foundation is centred upon the on-going working practice
Penzance – a trail of art and heritage attractions.
of Jackson collaborating with environmental organisations and those groups interested in the natural world as well as parts
Please take a look inside the Jackson Foundation Gallery on a
of the educational establishment. The commercial element to
Google virtual tour: http://www.jacksonfoundationgallery.com/
some of the exhibition programming feeds into and sustains the
index/virtual-tour/
Foundation, its aims and survival.
CDXXVII
ISBN 978-1-910993-19-4 Publication No: CDXXVII Published by David Messum Fine Art Š David Messum Fine Art
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Studio, Lords Wood, Marlow, Buckinghamshire. Tel: 01628 486565 www.messums.com Photography: Fynn Tucker Printed by DLM-Creative
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