The Tamar Dowr Tamer
All rivers carry not only water, but information. Mineral traces, a red stain of soil after a torrential downpour, chemical runoff, driftwood, boats, people, stories, language, history. Rivers form boundaries, but they also unite. Where a river runs, people may move. Long before the landscape was tamed by roads, goods and travellers went by water.
The River Tamar rises less than four miles from the North Cornwall coast, about half a mile from Woolley Cross, in a boggy thicket of willow and hazel which is said to be the last place in England where a wolf was killed. In Jackson’s painting of the source, Willow and Hazel Carr, tangled branches are described with a rhythm that makes them appear to protect and also to cage the upswelling of water. The river is discovered in the privacy of giving birth to itself; the painter chooses a viewpoint which does not violate this.
The Tamar rises and then runs more than fifty miles to the sea at Plymouth, by which time it has become a broad estuary, silver and battleship grey. Naval vessels and ferries push their way out of land; on a rainy day the light is as hard as iron. Jackson’s painting Misty Morning, Tamar, shows naval vessels precise and dogged at the horizon where huge sea meets huge sky. St John’s Lake, low tide, misty Plymouth also focusses on the spread of the sea-going Tamar, with its estuarine pulses of light and swinging curves. As the tide goes out, the colours of mud are exposed: pink, brown, lilac and purple. The sheen of rain keeps the mud supple and full of colour; the painting is full of intense, saturated light which runs in bands from the top to the bottom.
This show has evolved over as many years as Kurt Jackson has lived in Cornwall: that is, over his entire adult life. It reflects his passion for Cornwall and the concentration he brings to the work of discovering its landscape in order to paint it. Everyone who lives in Cornwall and travels upcountry will cross the Tamar over and over again. The railway passenger trundles a hundred feet above its vast grey waters at close to walking-pace, on Brunel’s magnificent Royal Albert Bridge at Saltash. The high-slung bridge groans under the weight of the train, and gulls sail beneath it with lazy, mocking effortlessness. Beyond terraces of housing, the distant Devon hills are electric green. Kurt Jackson’s sketchbooks show passengers reflected against night windows, or the train itself, high up, with light spilling from rectangles of glass.
Cars hammering along the A30 are over the river in a flash. There’s just time to spot that the welcome to Cornwall is written in two languages, and that the Tamar here is not much wider than a stream. For some travellers it’s no more than a road-sign, while for others it’s a rite of passage, the start of the holiday or the beginning of the end of the journey. But it may take many journeys before the traveller understands that the Tamar is not only a barrier and a crossing-point, but also a boundary where language, custom, culture and history change far more deeply than the easy rise and fall of the fields might suggest.
The works in this show were made over the past three years, when Jackson’s awareness of the Tamar had sharpened into a desire to explore the river from source to mouth, and to make paintings, drawings and sculpture out of this exploration. The work draws on his long relationship with the river, and as well as on other work which was made as part of the process rather than for show. Jackson hates the idea of redundancy and purposelessness: each work shown here is embedded in the organic whole of a project which captivated him artistically, intellectually and emotionally. With Caroline Jackson, he walked the river, swam, waded, canoed, explored overgrown banks and pools, gathered stories from farmers, water-bailiffs, local historians, industrial archeologists, ecologists and geologists. Kurt Jackson has an unusually close working partnership with Caroline Jackson. He says that ‘I love sharing these things’, talks about the two exploring the landscape together, and describes Caroline’s presence while he paints as that of a ‘silent witness’.
A strong theme in this exhibition is the transformation which a landscape goes through in the course of time. Human beings have gravitated to the Tamar for thousands of years, and left marks which may be as monumental as a huge ruined stone quay, or as concealed as a disused shaft in an oak thicket. Perhaps they are all but erased, like field patterns that can only be spotted from the air. Places may be misinterpreted, unless the beholder knows their history. Kurt Jackson learned about vanished heavy industry on river banks that now appear remote and rural. The area of Clitters Wood was once a tin and copper centre of European importance; there was tin-streaming here from mediaeval times, and by the eighteenth century there was a booming production of tin, copper, arsenic, sulphides and wolfram. The long-gone tumult of metal on metal and the snakey criss-cross of railway lines find their visual echo in Jackson’s painting Clitters Wood, where the surface of the water looks like beaten metal.
Such echoes and allusions are very much part of Jackson’s layered approach to his material. He stresses the importance of ‘reading about the lives that had been lived there – the inventiveness of people making the landscape work for them.’ In Wet sunday, Tamar meanders, old man’s beard, Halton Quay, the disused stone quays where once barges trafficked upstream with Plymouth’s nightsoil are now covered in fantastic wreaths of wild clematis. Shivers of wind and light break up the water surface, but no boat moves.
In Jackson’s view, the pictorial and aesthetic form one layer, while his drawing and painting practice is informed by a deep crossover between natural history, culture, local gossip, myths, legends and such instants of experience as his plunge into a salmon river after being told that no boat is allowed to trespass upon it. His plein air technique allows him to stay within the landscape to which he is responding, and the written notations he makes on the paintings are not only records but also another type of mark-making, a calligraphy which extends the action of the painted surface.
These written notes are often focussed on fleeting or unseen events, such as the flight of a dipper or the call of a shelduck. They capture another dimension of the painting’s origin. Kurt Jackson also modulates his surface through the use of texture. In most of these paintings he uses watercolour, ink, gouache, crayon and pastel, but in one or two he uses local found materials to supplement the texture. In TamarstoneWood, for example, sheep’s wool gives a dense, swirling richness to the trees.
Time is a presence in this work in many ways. Often Kurt Jackson notes the hour, and it becomes clear that these paintings were made at all times of day, as well as in all seasons and many weathers. To paint like this requires a slow tuning-in to the subtle rhythms of a day lived by light. One of the reasons for the deep appeal of Kurt Jackson’s work is that he touches on things we all know but too often hide from ourselves: that winter is not a finger stabbing at a central heating thermostat, that ecology is not a buzz-word and that no-one can ever truly own a river.
This show is as various as the Tamar, from the lush Edenic greens and ruddy-brown water of A blackbird sings to me: Tamar in spate, to the pewter river and coppery russet of the oak trees in Toes in the cold autumn Tamar, or to the sculptures of Tamara, the legendary daughter of an earth-spirit who was transformed into a river by her father as punishment for falling in love with a giant’s sons. In its lower reaches Kurt Jackson paints a river which moves to the ebb and flow of the tides, while in its upper reaches rain rushing off hills and moor-tops makes it surge over its banks. The paintings reveal a riverine landscape which is always changing and being changed by erosion, by pollution, by a slow green silting-up of overgrowth or by the slash-and-burn interventions of humans. Bridged and forded, poached and patrolled, mapped in the brain of an Atlantic salmon on the way to its spawning-ground or on old industrial maps of lost workings, the Tamar carries so much that in the end it’s almost a surprise to bend down, dip your hand and find that it’s also pure water.
If you concentrate long enough on any detail in these paintings – a fallen oak leaf, a twist of wild clematis, a block of dressed stone in the heart of a wood – it will reveal not only itself but its place, in this place. The work in this show is in part an homage to memory and to what is gone, but it is also very much about the moment itself before it vanishes into history, captured before the eye blinks, the light changes, or the heron flies away.
Helen Dunmore, June 2008
