Kurt Jackson

ARDNAMURCHAN

This body of work came about as a result of living here in the far west of Cornwall,where I had always presumed that Land’s End was the most westerly point of mainland Britain; on realising that this accolade actually went to Ardnamurchan, I felt I had to discover for myself this Scottish ‘Land’s End’.

Ardnamurchan – ‘the headland of the great seas’, presented itself as a remote Eden, bountiful with natural riches but elemental and testing meteorologically.Clambering up boggy mountain sides, tracing the coasts, or the streams’meanders, peering out of croft windows or crouching under the umbrella, I was stirred, stimulated and moved to paint that rich tapestry of the plants and beasties, the rock and bogs, the crofts and sheep, the rain with the sun, the sea and her islands.

This was an intensive Ardnamurchan immersion and saturation.

Kurt Jackson, 2010

PERIPHERALVISION
The Nomadic Art of Kurt Jackson

We must be humble.We are so easily baffled by appearances
And do not realise that these stones are one with the stars.

On a Raised Beach - Hugh MacDiarmid

Hanging on the walls of the National Gallery of Scotland there is a picture – small in scale yet monumental in thematic and art historical importance, entitled King Lear in the Storm.Although it was painted by the young Scottish genius, John Runciman as early as , it already reveals all the distinctive features which will later turn into the revolutionary movement of romantic art. In this radically innovative work of art we see the eponymous tragic hero standing on a high impregnable rocky promontory, with ruined buildings in the murky background, overlooking a storm-tossed sea. There is in fact no such scene to be found in Shakespeare’s play.What we are actual witnessing in this imagined pictorial drama is much more to do with the unstable psychological condition of Lear’s tormented mind as mirrored and expressed through the sublime forces of awesome nature.Thus, as with MacDiarmid’s cosmic connection between geological earth and stellar galaxy, the binding connection between human inner and natural outer experience is revealed to be continuous, and at the same time also mutually responsive.

Furthermore, that crucial relationship between objective view and subjective vision has been a predominant feature in the development of much of the best of Scottish romantic and modern landscape painting ever since Runciman. For instance we can see it to powerful effect again and again in the painting ofWilliam McTaggart, Joan Eardley,more recently with Barbara Rae – and here in the art of Kurt Jackson. It should of course, be quickly pointed out that neither Eardley nor Jackson can be technically classed as Scottish; for both were born south of the border of English parents.However, if we focus on the manner in which they earnestly engage with, and powerfully express their feelings towards their particular Caledonian subjects, then we can see that they fully take on the mantle of true Scots artists. For it has to be kept in mind that when it comes to the politics of the aesthetic,‘Scottishness’ is not merely about the chance circumstances of birth, but more importantly involves fundamental attitude and commitment on the part of the artist. From this perspective much of Jackson’s work is fully in accord with the practice and critical outlook of major Scottish modern artists such as JD Fergusson, Boyle Family and metaphysically, even Alan Davie – as well as McTaggart and Rae.

To return to painting – one of the most striking characteristics that these forementioned ‘Scottish’ landscape painters share is the resolute desire each has to seek out their chosen subject in some of the most peripheral sites around the Scottish coastline in order to create, in the words of the founder of Geopoetics, KennethWhite,“fertile interconnections, a nexus of communicative forces.”This was certainly the initial motivation behind the making of the paintings for this new major exhibition by Kurt Jackson at the splendid Dovecot Studio Gallery. Jackson developed an early love for the countryside from his childhood upbringing in Dorset.This passion has remained strongly with him throughout his artistic career and he has always been careful to keep a safe distance from the cosmopolitan scene. Instead, to see things more clearly from his own individual point of view, he has chosen to take up a peripheral position, preferring the role of the “intellectual nomad” in order to seek out “spaces that one cultivates in order to cultivate oneself,” to useWhite’s words again. For instance, he and his family have made their home and working base in a former farm,which they have converted and turned into an artistic oasis in a spectacularly bleak, but austerely beautiful, stretch of Cornish coastal moorland. From this studio base, Jackson, the artist and ecologist, is always up for a geographical challenge. So when he realised that Land’s End was not the most westerly point on the British mainland, not surprisingly, he immediately organised an expedition to the Scottish west coast peninsular of Ardnamurchan. This venture took place in early summer last year, and the resulting work, in all its varied character now on display for this exhibition, is the richly productive outcome of Jackson’s most recent northerly sojourn into the Scottish landscape.

In this near-elemental remote environment,with its amazing contrasts of dreich Scottish haar and the “chitterin’ licht” of spectacular sunbursts, Jackson, out in all conditions, intently studied the surrounding ancient volcanic terrain with its indigenous botanical and animal/bird wild life.Much of the landscape of Ardnamurchan recalls Cornwall for the artist – but on a much more epic scale.Thus inspired by such primordial vistas Jackson, the trained biologist-cum-artist, intently studied en plein air all these fascinating natural visual attractions with a mixture of scientific scrutiny and poetic delight.As can now be seen in this exhibition, the results of this intensely close contact and involvement with his subject sources have produced a complex, multi-perspectival painterly response.This ranges from the immediate on-the-spot impressionist sketches of passing meteorological effects, to the long and deeply considered triptych which powerfully expresses the epic scale and awesome grandeur that such a landscape carries for the artist. Interestingly, such a contrasting mixture of the fleeting and the monumental recalls Baudelaire’s early but profound concept of modernism as being of two inseparable halves – between “the transitory, the fugitive, the contingent, and the eternal and the immutable.” With richly rewarding results Jackson continues to work within that Baudelairian tradition of modernism.

Furthermore, the critical demand of the great nineteenth century French poet that all seriously committed modern art should be “partial, passionate and political”would also clearly apply to Jackson’s artistic credo and the dominant motivations and characteristics of all his art.

Whenever modern art is being seriously considered it always has to be remembered that it is made up of a number of different – even contradictory – types of modernisms.The two extreme versions are, on the one hand, the autonomous ‘art for art’s sake’ pure aesthetic formalism, and on the other, the deeply involved social and ethical committed modernism which Baudelaire in his Salons enthusiastically describes and passionately promotes.His alliterative trinity of critical values seems to very much strike a sympathetic accord with the art of Kurt Jackson. For example everything that Jackson artistically produces has a political impulse to it. Jackson of course does not deal in party politics;much more importantly, his art is concerned with the philosophical and ethical poetics of ecological politics.As with many others throughout our modern age he strongly feels that we have become more and more alienated from our natural environment, and his art, amongst many other things, is a reminder “to remain true to the earth”, as Nietzsche pleaded two centuries ago.

Naturally there is a strong romantic strain running through Jackson’s art, yet there is nothing woolly or soft-centred about it.This committed and concerned artist is always partial in his approach.This has a great deal to do with his former scientific training as a biologist,where the individual and distinctive nature of each particular natural subject is treated to equal scrutiny and representational respect.Ultimately however, like all truly serious artists, the aim of Jackson’s passionately motivated art is to reveal the underlying coherence which binds the whole of nature, including ourselves, into a unified, totally interrelated entity.This is what the ancient Greeks called the cosmos – the beautiful whole,where, as the Scots poet succinctly expressed it,“these stones are one with the stars.”

Even more than most,Hugh MacDiarmid was a mass of contradictions.He famously described himself as “whaur extremes meet”. For instance, he was on the one hand a fervent national patriot; yet, on the other, a committed international socialist. Thus much of his poetry is a heroic attempt to reconcile such challenging contradictions. To do so he had to in the end get back to fundamentals:“I must begin with these stones as the world began.” Kurt Jackson’s art also seems to follow a similar path. He too takes us back to the essential workings of our ecological environment, and being in empathic harmony with his surroundings, produces paintings that emerge for the sympathetic bond between natural and artistic creativity.Here the man-made divisions that separate us from each other and the world we have inherited, falls away as these truly holistic paintings show us how we might all respond to the poet’s challenging words:

We must reconcile ourselves to the stones
Not the stones to us.

Bill Hare,March 2010