The Cornish Crows

KURT JACKSON
DOCTOR OF LETTERS
honoris causa

On 16 July 2007, Kurt Jackson was presented with an honorary degree from the University of Exeter at its Tremough campus in Cornwall.The following is a transcript of Professor Christopher McCullough’s oration.

In the European Renaissance, landscape functioned as the scenery that formed the background to a portrait. From this relegated position, landscape became increasingly a subject in its own right by the late eighteenth century. With Kurt Jackson, the artist who we honour today, landscape has become something more intrinsically elemental to how the man shapes himself, his work and his life.When asked in an interview if he viewed nature as benign, as hostile to human beings, or as indifferent to them, his reply gives a clue as to the depth of thought and feeling in his paintings: ‘I think there’s a lot of claptrap spoken about what is “natural”.The actual landscape has evolved as a result of human use of it over the centuries from the neolithic period through to the industrial revolution … how you view nature depends on how you see yourself fitting into it. For good or ill, we cannot be divorced from the physical landscape.’

Kurt Jackson is one of the very few painters who maintain, as a central principle of their work, the ecological dilemma of our lives and the possibilities for a more sympathetic relationship with the earth. Kurt’s fight is with all that is conspiring to ruin the world.This fight is exemplified by the self-supporting lifestyle he and his family have achieved at their home in north Cornwall, right through to the concept that, as he states, ‘an ecologically principled lifestyle is in no way élitist or escapist.’ Kurt’s commitments are international: he is actively engaged as a campaigner with Aids Relief in Africa, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Oxfam, Survivors International and Water Aid. Nationally, he has raised money for the Cornwall Wildlife Trust, homelessness, as well as Surfers Against Sewage, which is now an international movement.

Kurt was brought up in a family of artists (his father is a Quaker) whose non-consumerist ideology was matched by their strong work ethic. His childhood, while creative in its exposure to the practice of the visual arts, was also spent running wild in the countryside playing with his friends in water meadows, bird watching, looking for beetles or catching wild animals.There does seem to have been a splendid synergy between his love of taking home his findings – flowers or a bird’s feather – and making sketches of them with notes describing the object. Often, observers of Kurt’s work have been tempted to draw comparisons with Turner’s later landscape watercolours. While that comparison certainly does bear justification, there is also a clear link between Kurt’s childhood experience of nature and those nineteenth-century naturalists who were as equally skilled in their botanic paintings as they were in their accompanying scientific notes.This form of expression, which is currently experiencing a renewal of interest, may be observed in those moments when Kurt adds written notes to the surface of his paintings.

From school he won a place at Oxford to read zoology, but his relationship with fauna and flora leaned more towards the direct experience of the senses, than to academic observation. He says, ‘The enjoyment I experienced as a child was in knowing what was happening at the bottom of that hedgerow or what was migrating overhead at a certain time of the year, I couldn’t get that at the cellular study level … It had to be something that would relate to where I was living.’The need for this direct experience of nature led him to do what was necessary to get through his degree, while his real work and passion drove him to escape to painting the water meadows around Oxford.

It was at Oxford that Kurt met Caroline who is his life partner. I choose these words carefully as I sense they are, in the fullest and most splendid sense, a partnership. For more than a year after their graduation in 1982, the couple trekked across Africa, also travelling all over Europe and later Latin America.This is travel, not in the sense of the cultural tourist, but as those who seek to gain an intimate knowledge of the people and their landscapes.This is clearly very important to Kurt and to the subtle ways, by which he has a sense of himself, as we may see, articulated through his painting. Being largely self-taught has freed Kurt from many of the constraints often imposed by the conservatoire. His superb draughtsmanship combined with the overwhelming sensuality of his brushwork is born out of his intense desire to pursue his own journey.

This journey has led him and his family ever westward into Cornwall to where they now live and work outside St Just. Kurt is as much part of the communities in Cornwall, as he is at one with the landscape, no matter what form that may take. He does not compartmentalise his life: his family; his art; his belonging to the community; his strong commitments to international movements are all one, they form the man.

While he continues to create many fine paintings and sketches from his travels, his knowledge of the Cornish landscape is intimate in the deepest sense. He works predominantly out of doors starting with exhaustive and intimate explorations of his chosen field: sensing the environment viscerally. His work may be epic – he has remarked that one of the true wildernesses around Cornwall is the sea with no land visible – producing the extraordinarily evocative seascapes for which he is well known; but even here he does not lose sense of the political dimension that informs his reading of a land (sea) scape. His telling observation is, ‘You can look out to the Atlantic and there is no visible sign that we have done anything to it, although we know we have.’ Alternatively, his work is also intimate when he retreats to patches of briars painting them from the inside, so to speak, or peering into the bottom of a blackthorn hedge.

Whatever the site chosen for a day’s work, it will be out of doors, and his working methods demand the physicality, commitment and passion of a dancer. Often as not, the large canvas will be stretched out on the ground pinned down by rocks. His whole being, physical and emotional, is engaged in the action of painting as he shifts the horizontal band of the skyline and the foreshore up and down the canvas seeking the right point that will serve as the foundation to capture the mood and tone of the landscape at that moment. At the end of a day’s work he will have reached a state of physical exhaustion.

When he was invited by local miners to paint them at work, a different kind of physicality was demanded of Kurt that revealed his political sensibilities and, often, ambivalent attitudes towards that ‘landscape’. He sees how a mine creates a wound in the landscape, but also how that action may give rise to small new ecosystems, while further knowing that the extracted stone will eventually be used to build more roads. He felt it was necessary to be invited to work alongside the miners and to avoid the tradition of painting that over-romanticised physical labour. His relationship is with the people with whom he lives, documenting their lives and hardships, and creating a dual narrative landscape of people and place.

Kurt often inscribes his paintings with comments about the weather, or as a means of enhancing the sense of place. Because he finds titling paintings awkward and artificial, he began to write on them while on site as a form of final mark or full stop.This has led him to the technique of making rubbings of signs that are part of the landscape and transferring them to the paintings, either a means by which to enhance the sense of place (sometimes he achieves this with found objects attached to the painting), or to alert the viewer to the inappropriateness of signposts that intrude into the landscape.Where a word or phrase is required to intrude upon an image to create a necessary tension, it will be employed. There is, after all, a rather good precedent in George Braque’s early collages.

Kurt is, in the very best sense, obsessive. He rarely stops working. Bertolt Brecht described his eponymous hero Galileo as being greedy: obsessively greedy for life; greedy for knowledge; greedy for experience. Such is my sense of Kurt, not simply in his work, but in his whole engagement with living. In a time when the visual arts often seem locked into a cool ironic interplay of imagery, how important it is to have someone among us who is willing to fight for the re-integration of humankind with the planet through his art. It is vital for all of us to know and experience the work of this admirable humanist.

We must not let the moment pass without pausing to reflect that Kurt’s son Seth is, at this precise moment, graduating from Cardiff University with a degree in Environmental Geoscience.That Kurt asked me to include this news in his oration attests to the warmth of the bond that exists between him and his family.

Chancellor, I now have pleasure in presenting Kurt Jackson for the degree of Doctor of Letters, honoris causa.

Christopher McCullough, Professor of Theatre, University of Exeter