Kurt Jackson
TREE: GWEDHEN
The Trees Of Cornwall
For the last few years I have turned my attention to the tree population of Cornwall.Without the intention of producing an encyclopaedic survey of these plants, I wanted to spend time with them and portray their form and quality;‘the way’ of particular individuals familiar to me, as well as searching out certain infamous veterans and examples of some of the more characterful and maybe characteristic species.
Seth,my son has been working in habitat conservation in Cornwall and often brings home saplings and branches, boughs and whips to the studio for me to paint as still lifes. Some of these make up a small series in the exhibition.
This body of work includes one of the rarest trees in Britain and some of the oldest; trees planted by my family in the orchard, trees in blossom, in fruit, naked in winter.
Kurt Jackson, 2011
AN EVENING
SEPTEMBER 09
And then I pushed a sycamore leaf
into the fire
on this divine, still, cool but warm
autumnal evening
from a tree that we planted
only a few years ago
inTerry’s hedge
near this fire,
whip – sapling – tree – leaf
a delight
with firelight.
And then I pushed a sprig of furze
into the fire
onto the sycamore’s embers
and as the fireworks blazed
a gorse-golden incandescence
I felt the ghosts watch me,
their presence…
the past’s necessity.
(yes I cooked a fish on it but …)
but an indulgence,
not the furze faggots
of old,
but still a delight
with fire light.
Kurt Jackson
THE TREES OF CORNWALL
Ihave my own favourites.Along a field boundary on Roughtor Farm, north-west corner of Bodmin Moor: a line of hawthorns,wind-curled like a breaking wave.Gweek Drive above the Helford river, early spring: cathedral vaults of pale green leaves, hushed columns of beechtrunk. King Harry Reach, south ofTruro: scrub oaks dipping their limbs into the top of the tide.And another, an astonishing detail far up a rarelyvisited stretch of the Fal: an oak bough that has grown so intimately with a holly that it has wrapped itself around one of its branches, so that it appears the holly has actually grown through the oak.
Among the popular images of Cornwall – the brochure cliffs and surf beaches, the bare moors and stone monuments, the bleached fishing villages, the hard-edged mining towns – trees play a part only by their absence. Cornwall is the blasted heath and the ‘trees of Cornwall’ sounds like something from a word game, an exercise in creating spatial contradictionsin- terms – like the snows of Egypt, or the deserts of Switzerland.Yet trees there are. Like so much else in this strange and wonder-filled peninsula, they can pull you up short when you see them, as you struggle to identify what makes them so stubbornly impressive, so different.
Far from being some marginal ornament in the county’s inventory, Cornwall’s trees in fact embody much of its genius loci, that quality that has resisted a thousand attempts to define it, and which strikes visitors the moment they cross theTamar. Something about the trees’ tenacity and their lack of abundance sits well with the isolation of Cornwall, its tentative probing into the great ocean. Even their shape suggests variation, a botanical mutation in response to Cornwall’s conditions.The ancient indigenes are all here, those hardy settlers of post-glacial Britain – but the beeches are rarer, the ashes smaller, and the oaks’ twistings more crazy. Like the native Cornish themselves they have been joined, particularly along the coast, by exotic incomers – rhododenderons, camellias,magnolias,mimosas, cordylines and araucaria. In the sun these exotics give a brief whiff of far-off shores but see them in the winter or in a summer gale and you are reminded, as so often in Cornwall, that we are all the same before the forces of nature.
For over twenty years, Kurt Jackson has trodden and re-trodden the Cornish landscape like an early Irish monk.The fruits of his wanderings are contemplations, individual paintings and whole series on Cornwall’s coastline, its ancient tracks, its islands, estuaries and rivers.Now he has swivelled his ever-attentive gaze to the trees.His method though remains constant. Spending hours outside, he sinks into his surroundings until he all but disappears, leaving only the whispers of the wild.Hence his marginal jottings and titles (‘a robin sings, petals fall’,‘the rook nests sway in the wind’,‘a deer runs past me, the evening chorus starts’).
Some of the images of this series offer trees in their human context – figures walking beneath a tunnel of elm, a chusan palm against a white wall onTresco. Some have their own story – the ‘first and last’ ash near Land’s End, or the elephant’s foot shape as Cornwall’s oldest oak treads firmly on its ground.Others are lone trees in the landscape (a thorn tree on St Mary’s, an apple in blossom).
What Jackson’s tree images have in common is an intimacy.He is not so much presenting the trees’ physical form as the experience of them. Even in Cornwall, trees are such a part of our daily lives that it is easy to overlook them. But to dwell on the pictures is to rediscover some of the awe due to these giants.They are easily the largest living thing we are ever likely to touch, to lean against, to lie beneath, to inspect up close (and half of them still hidden beneath the ground).With hundreds of thousands of leaves transpiring hundreds of gallons of water vapour into the atmosphere each day, and the extraordinary way of drawing the moisture up from the soil, and their role as the primary indicator of changing seasons, the most evocative sign of the turning year, trees are an ever-present show of miracles. Saunter among them in one of Cornwall’s tucked-away valleys, sit in their shade,watch the breeze play on their boughs, gaze at the squiggles of their branches against a winter sky. Jackson’s paintings recreate the profound pleasure of all these things. But be warned: they are also likely to send you reaching for your coat.
Kurt Jackson’s painting is always underpinned by such urgings. It combines the integrity not only of his own beliefs but of his method: pictures made in the outdoors send us back outdoors. Both meditative and celebratory, hisTree:Gwedhen series adds to a sound which is spreading upwards from the earth, a sound that Jackson has been listening to for years and which helps to give his work its great power, its profound relevance. It is a sound being picked up now by more and more people – painters, writers, conservationists and anyone with the right antennae, a note rising from beyond the deepest of tap-roots to the hiss of the wind high in the canopy, part warning, part prayer: re-examine the natural world,marvel at its intricacy, its diversity, its shapes and form, spend time with it, venerate it.
Philip Marsden,Ardevora, July 2011
