PORTH

FOREWORD

Kurt Jackson’s affinity with the wild West Cornwall landscape has been the key to the way his work has developed. Out in the wind and rain and sunshine, he has laid down on paper a vision of its most transient effects and of its enduring essence. Moving from paint on paper to paint on canvas, he has translated his light expressive graphic touch into a powerful painterly language. Adding collaged flotsam and jetsam, as he has in these new paintings, has toughened the surface and underlined the harsh reality of the environmental issues that are so important to him. The big new paintings in this exhibition were made to hang together in the Upper Gallery here at Newlyn, together presenting an almost overwhelming impression of the place – Priest Cove, near St Just – and of its sea and sky. Plans for the show coincided with Jackson beginning work in a new, much larger studio so the shift in scale to create a complete installation for the Newlyn gallery was timely. It is a pleasure for us to be able to present new paintings here at Newlyn and, with welcome support from the Arts Council’s National Touring Programme, at Worcester City Art Gallery from 6th March to 1st May. We are grateful to John Russell Taylor, who has written a fine essay for this catalogue. David Messum, who regularly shows Kurt Jackson’s work in his London gallery, is showing more new paintings and works on paper from 14th to 31st January at 8 Cork Street, and from 14th to 18th January at the London Art Fair, Islington. The artist and his wife Caroline have helped a great deal with the preparation of this catalogue and the exhibition itself. We thank them both, on behalf of the Gallery and the many people we know to be looking forward very much to seeing Kurt Jackson’s work here.

Elizabeth Knowles
Director
January 2004

KURT JACKSON: PORTH

It all depends what you mean by ‘traditional’. From some points of view it might seem to be an insult, or at least a severe limitation, laid on Kurt Jackson to call his art traditional. That is, if you visualise traditional art as locked into the past and diametrically opposed to innovation of any kind. On the other hand, it has become a commonplace of criticism to see Henry Moore as the last in a line that goes straight back to Michaelangelo – which is undeniably true – while no one would regard him and his sculpture as antiquated and obscurantist. He is simply the latest development and extension of a great humanist tradition which is still a living, changing thing. This is exactly the sense in which Jackson is a traditional painter. You cannot see any of his landscapes, large or small, oil, acrylic, watercolour, or mixed media, without being aware of a great body of tradition underlying it: a tradition which clearly includes Turner’s later, most abstracted works, Constable’s more private watercolour sketches, and elements of Impressionist and Expressionist ideas on landscape (from, say, Monet and Nolde) as they have filtered into the mainstream of British art.

That may be an important part of it. But these are only the foundations on which Jackson’s personal style is built. It is evident, for example, even in the simplest, most direct of the plein-air watercolour studies, that Jackson has been aware of and digested the art of some New York Abstract Expressionists, and even more, their being closer to his own generation, the German so-called Neo-Expressionists like Anselm Kiefer: hence the frequent incursions of apparently random dashes and blobs of colour, which cannot be explained in terms of detailed observation but are very important to conveying the spirit and feeling of the scene as they strike the observing artist. Then there is Jackson’s interest in the quasi-sculptural application of non-painting elements to the surface of his canvases. Sometimes it may be incorporating the material observed – sand, pebbles – to ‘represent’ itself. Sometimes it is a metaphor, or even a sort of pun, as in Catch a wave and, even more strikingly, in Catch the light, where the catching of the ungraspable wave, or the wholly impalpable light, is conceived almost literally, as something that could be done with the net attached to the front of the canvas. (One thinks of all the folk-tales that Cornwall has in common with the rest of Europe, concerning the yokels who go out at night to catch the pond-reflected moon in a net.) Sometimes, even, the addition can be, as in All That’s Left, a set of rotted, long-abandoned waterproofs which seem to take the place of their absent owner.

And there is yet another important element of Jackson’s art which is wholly untraditional. I mean, of course, his use of scribbled inscriptions along with more formal, printed words and phrases. One can readily find apparent parallels, even before the 20th century: Edward Lear’s lavishly annotated landscape drawings and watercolours, for instance. But these were meant entirely as preparatory studies, aides-memoire for when and if he based a major formal oil on the subject. They were certainly never meant to be publicly shown. In the 20th century what had been a practical preparation became a deliberate artist’s stratagem. Some of the later 20th-century examples – the printed words in some of Ruskin Spear’s works, later taken up by such as Tom Phillips and RB Kitaj – seem to chime with Jackson’s practice, while his delight in scrawling almost graffiti-like inscriptions (frequently in Cornish) across his seascapes is likely to remind us of some recent American artists, especially Cy Twombly, who inscribes his paintings in a very similar fashion and does, from time to time, paint tempestuous seascapes hovering forever on the edge of abstraction. This is an important point in relation to Jackson’s work also. There is probably no single work that could be mistaken for an out-and-out abstraction: the landscape basis is always patent. But sometimes it is a very close thing. One feels, looking at these extraordinary works, that the documentary element – making some kind of a record of what is before the artist’s eyes – is important, but is only one strand. Equally present, and arguably even more important, are how the artist feels about what he sees, and how, at some deep, instinctive level, he apprehends the spirit of time and place. If this sounds slightly mystical, that is not very far from the mark. Not, possibly, that Jackson himself would see it that way. Curiously, as the son of two artists cum art teachers, he was never formally trained in art, but on the contrary, read Zoology at Oxford (as did his wife Caroline), which sounds very no-nonsense and scientific. In fact, on graduation they set off on a very Hippyish (or Traveller) sort of gap year, trekking the length and breadth of Africa. And then, just as if it were the most natural thing in the world, they settled in Cornwall and he began painting. The process, for him, is clearly obsessive. His whole life, including wife, children and general life-style, is intimately bound up with the making of art. He has tended, right since making his life-choice of painting, to work in coherent projects, worrying at a subject until he feels he has teased out all that he can from it – though he insists that no subject is ever sucked completely dry. Consequently, he has done intensive series of paintings concerned with specific mines and quarries, usually reflecting the changing face of life in Cornwall. (Frequently, Jackson was the last man in before the business closed down completely.)

More to the point of his latest work, he has carried out several projects connected with physical journeys. It is not entirely surprising that Mike Tooby, then Director of Tate St Ives, after seeing a show of Jackson’s, asked him if he considered himself a Conceptual Artist. The answer is, that he does not, but he might well. These walking projects sound, and indeed are, rather like the artistic walks undertaken by Richard Long or Hamish Fulton. Except that when they come home with the results of their perambulations, these tend to be physical relics – pebbles, feathers, twigs – along with photographs, and neatly printed scripts outline or comment on the itineraries. Jackson, on the other hand, simply paints. His drawings and watercolours are always made plein-air, his larger works in the traditional manner, working in a studio from sketches made on the spot. On many of his walks he has actually made a study every few yards as he progressed, so that the result takes on some of the characteristics of a child’s flick-book. But the point of these processes is always visual. Conceptual, yes, but the concept is always expressed in visual, and specifically painting, terms.

All this is vital background to his latest series of works, Porth. ‘Porth’ is the Cornish word for bay or cove. And all the works in this major show are based on his experience of a specific cove, very near to where he lives in St Just. This is called on the Ordnance Survey maps ‘Priest’s Cove’, but as he points out, that should actually be ‘Priest Cove’: it has nothing to do with priests in any shape or form, being what language experts call an onomastic fantasy, one that is evolved out of an aural misunderstanding. The name has in fact, as one of his new cycle of large (some of them very large) paintings indicates in an inscription which runs right across it, evolved from the Cornish words identifying the place as St Just’s ‘porth’, so that the current name is in fact tautological. Be that as it may, the effect of the one location, with its outlying islets, is quite palpable in the giant mixed-media canvases which make up the show. They all start with Jackson looking out to sea (from what is very nearly the most westerly point of Britain), and taking in, on a factual level, the water and the light on it, the distant horizon chimerique, the movement of the waves breaking on the shore, the shapes and textures of the shore upon which it breaks. But that is only stage one. From there the physical scene is deconstructed and put together again in the artist’s mind and from there on to canvas in the studio. (The process is not so peculiar when you remember that the Chinese way of painting landscape is for the artist to take it in at leisure, then turn his back on it to paint its essence from his own inner eye.)

The scene is reduced to its essentials in the artist’s memory and imagination, then re-created in painting form, and sometimes built up even further by inscriptions and adhesions. Jackson has an acute eye, a focused intellect (he was not trained as a scientist for nothing), and an intense, instinctive bonding with the land (and sea) around him. Heart and mind, and, dare one say, soul are finely, inextricably fused in his art, and we are all the beneficiaries.

John Russell Taylor
Art Critic,
‘The Times’