The Cornishman - 21st June 2001

Artistic meditations on the slate of Delabole

Quarry holds an aesthetic fascination for St Just artist Kurt Jackson

While it seems unlikely that artist Kurt Jackson and train robber Ronald Biggs would have anything at all in common, oddly enough, they have a mutual interest in the capital of Cornwall’s slate country, Delabole. It was there that the infamous Ronald Biggs spent some of his formative years as an evacuee from the London blitz and where, as he was to confess many years later, that he committed his first crime when he rolled a large rock into the famous quarry.

And it was there that Kurt Jackson was to spend part of every year when growing up. Engaged in more innocent pursuits than Ronnald Biggs, among other things, he played football for Delabole and recalls sitting on the edge of its vast quarry, looking into its depths, seeing and hearing the tiny distant figures below blasting the slate from its bed.

As part of last year’s Year of Artists, he was fortunate in being able to return, for the first time since he had left, to the scenes of his bodyhood, but this time as artist-in-residence at the quarry, where he was to spend most of the autumn and winter of last year drawing and painting this unusual place and the people who work there.

The fruits of his labour can now be seen in the Cornwall Geological Museum in Penzance.

As someone once said: “They were taking slate from Delabole when Shakespear was writing ‘Hamlet’, when Drake was driving the ‘Spanish Armarda off the sea, and they are still doing so.” To capture and convey a sence of such a spot demands the services of an artist of equally marvellous ability. George Hamilton, managing director of the Delabole Slate Company Ltd, said: “This is a private Cornish company employing local people, making traditional produce for the modern age.” They could hardly have invited anyone better than St Just-based Kurt Jackson to take up residence there and carry out such a task.

An en plein air artist extraordinaire, one who is never happier than when braving the elements, wearing a safety helmet, wrapped in oilskins, drawing and painting cheek by jowl with the work force, these paintings by Kurt Jackson form part of an ongoing series relating to people and their work place. He has already focussed his attention, and with acclaim, upon the employees and environs of South Crofty tin mine and Carnsew granite quarry and one cannot help wondering whet he will do next - but that’s his secret!

Born in Dorset, Kurt Jackson read zoology at Oxford University where, despite having spent as much time as possible while there at the Ruskin College of art, graduated from St Peter’s College with an honours degree in the subject. Not surprisingly, perhaps, on leaving Oxford art took precedence over zoology. He has travelled extensively: “From journeying across the Artic to hitching across Africa, ” before settling in St Just in the mid-80s with his wife Caroline and their three children.

A member of the Newlyn Society of Artists and the Royal West of England Academy, he has since exhibited almost as extensively as he once travelled, from Cornwall to Cumbria, and further afield from Ireland to France and Germany, acquiring a considerable reputation for his high quality paintings. While he works in a way members of the Newlyn School would recognise and no doubt applaud, at the same time he pays allegiance neither to the academic, somewhat conservative, approach of the late 19th century ‘Newlyners’, nor to the post-war avantgarde artists of St Ives, but remains very much his own master.

A conservationist with a realistic concern for all that is happening in the environment, aware of the need as well as the effect of man’s footprints in the landscape, he depicts the dignity and the “lovely face” of honest labour alongside nature in the raw, and all without as much as a hint of sentimentality.

Whether looking into the depths of Delabole “from the viewing platform” or watching the quarry men “drilling down by the pool lit by afternoon sunlight”; recording a “memory of a dark sky with sun on the slate face” or “watching the gulls on the green pool below seemingly oblivious to the hammering, drilling and engine din, while gnats make love on every single slate surface sparkling in the sun”, Kurt Jackson’s compositions, mainly mixed media, several of them even contain slate mud and, for good measure, there are two drawn by a nail on slate, come loaded with all the poetry and potency of this peculiar place.

Pictures powered by the three E’s, excitement, energy and environment, they are best summed up by a fourth E - Electrifying!

Kurt Jackson’s paintings of the dirt, dust and dizzy depths; the men, their methods of working, and the magnificence of Delabole slate quarry, can be seen in the Cornwall Geological Museum, St John’s Hall, Penzance, 10 am to 4 pm daily, until the end of September. They then tour to the Appalachian slate belt, where there is every chance that they will be appriciated and admired by descendants of those who once worked in the huge slate pit at Deladole and left it, as part of the Cornish diaspora, to seek their fortunes in the good ol’ US of a.

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