The Visions of Kurt Jackson

We face south-west towards the Isles of Scilly. To our left is a coastal hill, Carn Gloose. On our right is Cape Cornwall and beyond, exactly a mile offshore, I’m told, is a series of rocky outcrops known as the Brisons. In Priest’s Cove we hop from boulder to boulder towards a series of larger, weed-mottled granite monoliths. They stand closer to the tide edge and offer us a perfect view of the incoming tide.

‘Hear that?’ he asks me as we search for a seat among the rocks. ‘In the Cornish language it’s called mordros. It’s the only language, along with Greek and Polynesian, I think, that has a word for the sound of the sea.’ Almost without pause, he continues. ‘If you look at that line in the beach, you can see the exact place where the basaltic mudstones meet the granite.’ Just these few details, like his translation of the Cornish place name (carn means ‘rocky hillock’ and gloose means ‘grey-green’) and his awareness of the precise distance the Brisons lie offshore, indicate a man deeply embedded in his landscape.

I’m with the artist Kurt Jackson who, after a childhood in which he regularly holidayed in Cornwall with his parents – both also painters – moved to England’s most southerly county with his family in the early 1980s. Now in his late forties, he’s regarded as one of the most important landscape artists in Britain. But the words ‘landscape artist’ don’t really encompass the scope of his work. Some of his most glorious and ambitious paintings are of inner London and as far from the conventional notions of landscape as it’s possible to be. Then there are the series of images depicting the lives of both Cornish charcoal makers and workers in the local slate quarry at Delabole. There was also his exhibition of works, completed deep inside the earth, on Cornwall’s last working tin mines, or a parallel project in Iberia documenting Spanish and migrant Cornish miners.

There is an ecological relationship between Jackson and his paintings that makes them fascinating not merely to a lover of art, but also to a naturalist. It is in this second role, as a watcher of nature myself, that I’ve come to sit with Kurt Jackson over several days. My intention is to watch him as I might study a species of bird, like a rook or a jackdaw. The deep connection between Jackson’s art and the landscape he occupies is my theme. It starts to unfold almost as we begin to settle into our pitch – opening the boxes of paints and crayons and adjusting our seats to observe our respective subjects. Suddenly, a small brown flake chips off the rocks ahead of us and acquires the power of flight. It performs a circuit around our heads and returns to its original perch. A high, clear, insistent alarm call, a sound that seems perfectly designed for puncturing the mordros, suggests that a type of small grey-brown bird called a rock pipit is alert to our arrival.

Jackson notes the presence of the pipit and explains how, sitting in the same spot for hours, such creatures often begin to accept him as a congenial part of the landscape. Birds and other animals – shrews, stoats, weasels – will come right up to him. Incidental details – minutely observed parts of the scene, perhaps the weather or the sounds he can hear, and very often the other species that share the habitat with him as he paints – will be noted in a little scribbled message on the canvas edge, and sometimes right across the top, through the sky. These marginal inscriptions often become the titles of his paintings.

Occasionally the signs he makes in this way are even more intimate. For some of the largest canvases, Jackson works barefoot, moving around them and even directly across them to apply the paint. On one huge piece I noticed a size-ten blue footprint. His paintings convey, even in the quiet and detachment of a gallery space, the pressing contingency of the places that inspire it, the unseen inhabitants to whom the landscape truly belongs, and the unseen artist who shared that moment with them.

If the incidental marks that he makes himself on the paintings are a form of personal signature to his work, then his borrowings from a place can seem like the landscape’s own interventions. Wool is a favourite material, but you’ll also find feathers and seaweed, leaves and twigs, even bits of sand and gravel out of a streambed. A recent memorable work documenting the River Avon is notable for the plastic bottles and other indestructible flotsam which have been engineered into the scene. But one of the most moving examples of Jackson’s use of found materials is the way he experiments with mud that he collected from the shaft floor while working underground in a tin mine – the same dust that once blackened the faces and blighted the lungs of miners here in Cornwall and elsewhere. Dirt converted to art.

As we watch the Atlantic pounding in towards us, I find myself being distracted from the study of Jackson by another rare bird in the landscape. While the artist sketches out a preliminary scene, I spot a peregrine falcon – probably a male – as it cruises over the sea. A slate-grey bullet, it steers south and west but is blown gradually inland towards us. It rises over Carn Gloose and loiters, the air rinsing its wings, the bird wind-held. Jackson sees it with the naked eye as soon as it slips free of the Brisons. He then turns back to his work, as he pushes a fistful of brushes across his portrayal of the leaden sky from which the bird has just flown.

Immense elemental forces often seem to lie just below the surface of Jackson’s paintings. There is also a sense of the earth-quaking energies that first initiated the proto-landscape from which the present scene evolved. When I see his works of Priest’s Cove, for instance, I see not only the finished granite boulders, but I can feel the molten magma that gave them birth, awkwardly and violently, aeons ago.

As soon as I see that fistful of brushes scouring back and forth across the canvas, I begin to sense the answer is at hand. There is a frenetic pace to the way in which Jackson works: hands roving, sometimes as if panic-stricken, for pencils and bottles, inks and crayons. He then breaks off briefly to incise with a razor blade a bruised grey sky he has just laid down. The act of slashing vigorously at his own work makes me realize that the energies conveyed in the paintings are achieved by a gradual slackening of control over the forces that create them. This releasing of himself into the process reaches its climax about half an hour later, as the roar of the sea imposes its ineluctable rhythm on us both.

I’m struck most by the sheer range of materials and techniques: not just the spectrum of ink bottles, crayons, pastels, pencils – the material stuff he uses – but also odd things such as the moment when he grabs the actual palette itself, dragging it repeatedly over the layers of colour. Another time he empties the muddy water – which he’s used earlier in mixing his colours – wholesale out of the palette on to the painting and starts working with that. The razor blade is deployed repeatedly, and if that doesn’t create the desired effect, Jackson uses his nails and tells me that he never bites them precisely because of their instrumental value to him. At one point, in fact, he uses all ten fingers and thumbs and it looks as if he’s playing the piano in his own wet paint.

On another occasion I can actually count the number of brushes in his hand. He has twelve and wields them like a weapon against the image. Then he can hold them not by their handles, pencil-wise, but laid flat in the palm of his hand, with the bristles flicked almost individually so that tiny specks of paint are sprayed on to the painting. The subtlety of this last technique contrasts sharply with his method of swiping the brush hard at the picture, like a swordsman testing a blade, lacing the canvas with great big drops of paint. At the finish, he blows hard and stands back. The earlier crescendo has taken five minutes, but it feels like – in fact, you know that it is – the summation of twenty-five years of apprenticeship, a word he cherishes. I work out afterwards that he uses a different approach or technique every thirteen seconds, and at times I found it nearly impossible to observe him and write up the processes as they happened.

Improbably, given the intensity of his application both to the changing landscape and to the even faster-moving portrait of it, Jackson talks to me all the while. Or rather, I should say, he’s talking to himself. But I do manage to capture the last word: ‘MENTAL!’ It’s odd – given the ecstatic tumult of the preceding minutes – that it’s not a reference to himself, or a comment even on how I might be feeling. He nods to the sea: ‘Looks as if they’re about to overwhelm you…the waves.’

There are two mental scenes before me. There is the Atlantic and the rock. And over Jackson’s shoulder, I glimpse its twin: the painting of the grey-turquoise sea-slump, calm and expansive, just behind a frenzy of white spume careening into the basalt’s blackness. It is the mordros made visible – a thing of colour and elemental contest and of beauty.

Click here to see a selection of Kurt Jackson’s artwork.