Seven Days (Vermont USA) - 26th June 2002

Piece of the Rock. By Marc Awodey

The Duchy of Cornwall is a windswept peninsula on Britain’s Southwest coast. Its landscape of moors and cliffs overlooking the sea is very different from Vermont’s but beneath that landscape is a mineral resource the two places have in common: Slate. One of Vermont’s three offical state stones is slate, and in Cornwall it has been mined for at least a thousand years. Cornish artist Kurt Jackson brings the countries together, as it were, in his current exhibition, “The Delabole Slate Quarry Paintings,” at the Helen Day Art Centre in Stowe.

Although he is considered one of the leading open-air painters in Britain, this is Jackson’s first U.S. Exhibition. It is the portrait of a place, captured in 26 mixed-media paintings produced at or near the quarry. That hole is 435 feet deep and about a half-mile wide in the midst of a flat countryside two miles from the ocean. Its gray walls are rugged and terraced, and blue green water is pooled on the floor of the quarry. Jackson organizes these contrasts into simple compositions that have just a few key elements.

“Dusk (nearly) slipping into the quarry 16 Nov 2000” is a view looking directly into the cerulean pool. A few concentric white lines, the roads in the quarry, make a broad downward loop. The quarry walls range from Prussian blue and raw umber near the pool to Indian red and cadmium yellow along its rim. Jackson’s colours and textures are as complex as his compositions are simple, as if the layers of colour and texture were imitating the sedimentary geology of the quarry.

“Windy dusk Oct 200” has a high horizon and colours of the surrounding landscape, as well as the quarry and its pool. Jackson’s brush seems to slap, scrub and scumble every square inch of the canvas. There are often bits of grit in his paint, and he seems to be combining acrylics, gouache and water colours almost indiscriminately to take advantage of their varying degrees of opacity.

Collaged block letters spelling “DELABOLE SLATE” are also often intergrated in Jackson’s scenes. In “Windy dusk Oct 2000” the mine name appears along the bottom of the piece. There are also almost invisible cursive passages, like “cold winds keep blowing me into the brambles.” but Jackson’s use of the text is often completely unassuming, just another human imprint on the landscape. It adds a layer of visual information that recalls the context of the moment portrayed.

The exterior world of wind, brambles, sky, water and an opened pit of stone is just half of Jackson’s portrait. As with Vermont quarries, there are sheds where the stone is processed. The Delabole quarry once employed 1000 people. Only 40 remain. Jackson paints like a working-class artist with a real affinity for the men who toil over their cutting and splitting machines. Those images complete the portrait of the mine.

The industrial interiors are much more angular than the outdoors scenes, and Jackson completely shifts scale. Where the exterior are compact. Broad ranges of grey, blue and black are punctuated by a few bright colours in relative isolation. A red dab near the center point “Graham Sleep & Mark Powell splitting tiles Oct 2000” adds movement to the entire piece, while also limiting the depth of the space. The bright red moves forward from the blue-black far wall.

The red apron on the worker in “Plane house, Mark Sleep. Dec 2000” is exactly the same intensity, but the effect of the colour coming forward is used in a completely different way. That red makes the figure stand out from the surrounding tonalities and pushes the space further back. These techniques indicate Jackson is an extremely versatile painter.

Each of the “The Delobole Slate Quarry Paintings” is a virtuoso performance. Jackson’s technical mastery is a brilliant match for his wonderful intuition. Some painters might look into a quarry and see a hole in the ground or a harsh trespass against nature. Jackson sees the quarry, and the blue pool of ground water at its bottom, as a source of life. The stone sheds are places of honest labour. His multifaceted portrait of the mine and its environs has much to teach Vermont landscape painters.

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