THE PAPS OF JURA

‘Heart, mind and soul are, here and elsewhere, inextricably fused in Jackson’s art, and we are all the beneficiaries.’ John Russell Taylor, ‘The Times’.

Cornish-based artist Kurt Jackson will be showing a series of work of The Paps of Jura at the Dundas Street Gallery, Dundas Street, Edinburgh from 13 to 27 March 2004 followed by the RGI Kelly Gallery, Douglas Street, Glasgow from 3 to 17 April 2004. This exhibition chronicles the living landscape of the Paps of Jura and consists of forty mixed media pieces including etchings, canvases and works on paper.

Well-known as one of the leading British plein-air artists, Kurt Jackson spent most of spring 2003 on Islay and Jura painting the Paps for this exhibition. He has captured the very mood and sense of place of the exposed and raw Hebridean environment in his paintings. The climate played a significant role, and the works respond with great boldness – and yet a rare sensitivity dictated by the extraordinary springtime heat wave that coincided with Jackson working on Jura. One of the major paintings, A Scottish summer with no midges, sums up the exceptionally unseasonal weather.

Of his time on Jura, Kurt Jackson says: “In that hot, clear Easter weather – a summer with no midges – everything was golden; a landscape full of colour as it’s full of memories; the so-called ‘one of the last European wildernesses’, but everywhere there are signs of past habitation. Every rock and pile of stones is something – shielings, dykes cairns, duns, brochs – each with a story to tell, each with a name. Warm, golden spring days; always the red deer standing in lines on the hillsides; bog violets, deer tics and green hairstreaks hanging out around my feet in the heather. Each painting session was another unique experience, immersing myself in this richness, this Hebridean world, a paradise of Gaelic-named nature. Bare hill and mountainside; birdsong, insect flight and deer graze. Few people – for there are more deer than people. The deer eat seaweed on the beaches at dusk.

“I went to try and paint the Gaelic names, the flirting birds, the sunshine, the deer, the smell of the bogs and moors, the lack of midges, the recent and distant history, the geology, the taste of the whisky, the call of the hooded crow, the splash of the trout, the wind’s blow, the butterflies, the lizards, the cows on the beach – and The Paps, that’s all”.