Country Living Magazine - May 2002

Open Air Artist

In all weathers and all seasons, this self-taught painter takes to cornwall’s ancient pathways to chronicle the living landscape. By Hester Lacey.

If you have ever walked down a sheltered counrty lane in cornwall just as spring is turning to summer, Kurt Jackson’s painting will take you straight back to that moment. His picktures have an appeal beyond the visual, conjuring up the almost tropical heat, the lush green of hedgerows starred with flowers, the scent of fresh grass and the choral chirping of insects. And if you’ve ever watched a rainstorm rolling in towards the rocky Cornish coast, again he can recreate it in paint: the startling blue of the atlantic and the thunderous inky purple of he storm clouds.

Jackson has made his home in Cornwall for the past 19 years and his love for the county, one of Britain’s most mysterious, beatiful and remote, is evident. He is one of a rare breed in modern times: the plein-air (“open air”) artist, one who takes his materials with him and works directly from the landscape rather than closed in a studio.“There’s a great British and continental tradition of plein-air painting, but it came to a halt just before the Second World war,” he says. “A lot of contemporary artists don’t see it as fashionable, but I need that immediacy, I need that contact. It’s not enough to have just myself and what I’m painting, I need a third factor: perhaps a shower of rain at the wrong time, or the day when I was sitting painting and a family of shrews came running up my leg and across my lap. My involvment comes down to smelling and hearing what I’m painting as well as seeing it.”

One of Jackson’s favoured tecniques is to walk a stretch of footpath or road, creating a series of paintings from what he sees. The Tinners Way was one of his most recent projects. A 20-kilometer track that winds between Cape Cornwall and St Ives, it follows a high path over the wild Cornish moors that has been in human use since prehistoric times.

Jackson, his wife Caroline and their three children live in a whitewashed stone cottage with views that sweep over the Atlantic. The Tinners Way passes right by its door. “I’ve come to know this area very well, ” Jackson says. “I like to walk rather than drive, and I try to walk to the places I paint.” This intimate local knowledge is central to the way he lives as well as the way he works. “Everyone should be aware of their environment, the lie of the land where they’re living.”

At Piest Cove at Cape Cornwall, the start of the Tinners Way, lobster pots and fishing nets are stacked at the food of the cliff. Down in the cove is a cave Jackson used as a studio, until the day a violent gale flooded him out, and the remains of two Iron-Age forts stand guard on the hills above. Campion and wild garlic flourish in the hedgerows and cushion of the sea-thrift are soft underfoot. From here the path winds inland, past standing stones and dolmens, farmhouse and churches, passing over the moors before descending to St. Ives. On the moors, blazing yellow gorse looks “psychedelic” in summer, Jackson says. Here he has seen lizards, adders and slow-worms: badgers, weasels, foxes and rabbits: buzzards, ravens and kestrals.

The path keeps mainly to high ground; partly because of the wetness of the land but also, Jackson suggests, because of some ancient superstition that kept people out of the lower, darker places. The way, he says, has been walked since time immemorial; history is in its every inch. He points out Bronze Age field systems still in use today. “The path was used to transport tin from miners in the far west of Cornwall to St. Ives, for trade with the Phoenicians and Romans.” Disused tin mines, overgrown and tumbledown, dot the landscape.

When he starts work on a travelling project, Jackson begins with meticulous research. “I look up the geology, history and natural history of the route. Then I walk it with my wife, doing a series of raid sketches - I made 220 when we first walked the Tinners Way - and Caroline makes a video film. Then I look at the sketches and watch the film, to decide which places to revisit.” He will produce as many as 50 or 60 paintings, returning in all seasons and weathers. “You see a place you know will look great in early summer when the bluebells are up, or somewhere that would look great in a fierce winter storm,” he explains.

His love of the counrtyside stems from a chilhood passion for natural history. “ I spent all my time looking in hedgerows, flipping over stones, looking for beasties, ” he recalls. His long suffering parents turned over a room in their house to contain his collection of creepy-crawlies. Although he graduated in zoology at Oxford, he says he came out knowing less than he did when he went in: “while I was there, I descovered my talent for art through evening classes and it gradually took over.” The two disciplines seem to mesh well. “Natural history sharpened my observation skills, ” he says. “But there’s a great difference between making a botanical illustration and catching the craziness of a Cornish hedge, the stone, the insects, the history. There’s a degree of documentation in what I do, but sometimes it’s more about atmosphere than scale or content.”

A keen supporter of environmental causes, Jackson uses his work to raise funds for global charities, including Survival International and VSO, and local ones, such as the Cornwall Wildlife Trust. In 1999 he was artist-in-residence at the Glastonbury festival, and he has also painted new-age travellers, flower and vegetable pickers and the last working tin miners. “Wanting to paint the setting in which other people live and work reflects my facination with the environment I live in,” he explains. There is more to his work than simply presenting the beauty of the place he lives in; ultimately, he is chronicling a living landscape, history in the making.

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