Gallery News - Kurt Jackson paintings raise £85K
Kurt Jackson paintings raise £85K
Friends of the Earth climate campaign boosted by sale of Wicken Fen paintings
Leading landscape artist Kurt Jackson donated nearly £85,000 to Friends of the Earth on Friday night, raised from the exclusive sale of 27 of his paintings. The paintings are of Wicken Fen nature reserve in Cambridgeshire, which Kurt painted to highlight the fen’s vulnerability to climate change.
The paintings up for auction were mixed media works painted by Kurt in situ. They depict Wicken Fen in a variety of light and weather conditions and feature Kurt’s trademark hand painted descriptions, for example “Squeaky reed warblers distant cuckoo call, curlew choir” and “Lapwings are such sexy birds, reed beds full of bird twitter.”
Going under the hammer for the biggest sum was ‘Sunshine with approaching rain clouds’ – a 57 cm by 61 cm piece which sold for £7,000.
Kurt Jackson said: “The auction of my paintings was a huge success – I am delighted that such a large sum was raised for Friends of the Earth. This will help the environmental charity to keep on pushing for a stronger Climate Change Bill and campaigning for more solutions to environmental problems. We can all help to stop climate change and save beautiful wildlife habitats like Wicken Fen. It would be great to see more artists donating their paintings to charities in this way.”
Tony Juniper, Friends of the Earth’s Executive Director, said: “We are incredibly grateful to Kurt for his generosity. He sat among marsh and reeds at Wicken Fen for xx days in all weather conditions to produce these beautiful and evocative paintings just for us. The sum raised is even more than we had hoped, thanks to the art lovers who dug deep into their pockets to take a Kurt Jackson painting home, while helping to tackle climate change.”
Kurt Jackson is supporting Friends of the Earth’s demands for the government to strengthen the Climate Change Bill, which is currently before Parliament. The artist has been a supporter of Friends of the Earth since he was a teenager and this is the second year in a row that he has donated paintings to the green charity. Kurt and his wife Caroline live in a low-carbon home and believe passionately in protecting and preserving the environment.
Kurt Jackson has a growing number of fans, who follow his work through the Lemon Street Gallery in Cornwall and Messum’s Gallery in London, which are the two main galleries exhibiting and selling Kurt’s work on a long term basis.
Wicken Fen is one of the last remnants of the once massive Cambridgeshire Fens. A mixture of woodland, pools and boggy marsh, it has a rich biodiversity, including rare animals and birds like barn owls, marsh harriers, bitterns and otters. But the Fen is only a pocket of wilderness isolated in an expanse of intensive farmland. This makes it vulnerable because the population of each species is small and if they are wiped out by flood or drought – increasingly likely with climate change - there are no similar habitats nearby from which the Fen can repopulate. Wicken Fen is a National Trust nature reserve and the National Trust supported Kurt Jackson’s recent exhibition.
