Buy Kurt Jackson Paintings: Kurt Jackson is an environmentalist, ecologist, and one of the most well-known artists in the United Kingdom. ‘There is an ecological relationship between Jackson and his paintings that makes them attractive not only to a fan of art but also to a naturalist,’ argues Mark Cocker in his essay ‘The Visions of Kurt Jackson,’ published in Granta 102: The New Nature Writing.
I’ve come to sit with Kurt Jackson over several days in this second position, as a nature observer myself. My plan is to observe him as if I were studying a bird species such as a rook or a jackdaw. My topic is the strong relationship between Jackson’s art and the landscape he inhabits.’ Kurt Jackson has created a new body of work over the last few years while observing and photographing the population of shags and cormorants that can be found along our shore and waterways. Paintings, drawings, and two massive new carborundum prints done with renowned printmaker Simon Marsh are part of this series of studies of these amazing birds.
Jackson’s style evokes the sea’s cadence, which is both explosive and meticulous. Jackson’s seascape horizons have a magnificent enormity to them; often, his depiction of a landscape serves to remind us of the microscopic presence of humans inside it; how humanity has transformed the landscape yet can never totally control it. This is a theme he has explored by joining trawlers and fishermen on their boats, drawing and painting their deadly tasks as they work against the might of the sea. Jackson emphasizes the interplay between people and the landscape in this way, emphasizing the significance of both parties treating each other with respect.
Kurt Jackson and Laura Knight’s Horizontal Line
Louise Wheeler’s contribution: Kurt Jackson (b. 1961) and Laura Knight (1877-1970) created art in separate ages and societies, but their shared love of the sea, as well as their subsequent paintings that feature the lines of the sea’s horizon, connect their works together as embodiments of a sense of location. On a brightly lighted day, a drone camera circulates above the Cornish coastline from a privileged vantage point. It depicts the calm water breaking and folding in white crests against the rocky shoreline.
A surfer in a wetsuit and with a board under his arm steps into the churning waves. Kurt Jackson, an artist, stands on the rocky coast, watching his companion vanish into the sea. He was carrying a huge board on which he had written his paper. Jackson corresponds with fast pencil and pen lines on the page as his pal begins to surf. He hurriedly applies watercolor washes and acrylic inks, flipping and letting the paint stream. There is no easel; the board, like Jackson, is exposed to the elements of the sea. Before the sea itself billows in its waves and the entire painting is nearly drowned, the artist uses the rocks as a support, but Jackson moves it in time.
The tide eventually submerges Jackson, forcing him to flee to higher ground. Despite the fact that the tide is flowing past his feet, he continues to create at mid-height. The sea plays an important role in this artist’s work. Kurt Jackson went to Oxford University to study biology. He had a strong connection to the natural world since boyhood, as seen by his habit of painting from specimens and then annotating them. However, it wasn’t until Jackson took a gap year in Africa that he realized he wanted to be an artist and that the best place for him to do so was Cornwall.
Buy Kurt Jackson Paintings
In 1984, he relocated to Boscastle, where he began to grow as a painter; he still resides in St Just, Cornwall. Jackson has painted landscapes all around the United Kingdom, but Cornwall is central to his work. Indeed, from Cape Cornwall and Priest Cove to his most recent display Cot: A Cornish Valley at his gallery space, the Jackson Foundation in St Just, he has created various series based on the landscape of the West Cornish coast. Jackson has remarked that he must feel a connection to a place in order to paint it, and he has often returned to the same locations in order to seek out new viewpoints.
Jackson paints en Plein air in the landscape, as evidenced by drone video footage on his website, but he also works from sketches in his studio. Jackson’s drive to try new things has led to his use of a variety of mediums, as well as various objects and materials to construct the picture surface, ranging from newspaper to sand. Jackson’s painting approach reflects his comprehension of a landscape, and it is this process that is fundamentally abstract and dynamic, with Jackson utilizing numerous brushes and material at any same time. In The Fishing Fleet, Knight captures the Staithes community’s reliance on the sea as well as a sense of determination.
For huge works, Jackson works from the ground up, employing techniques such as wiping paint across the surface with the palette itself, as well as pouring paint straight onto the canvas. His finished paintings, however, have a realism that contrasts with their abstract origins. This aspect of man’s contact with the sea is also represented in the early work of Laura Knight, an artist who, while stylistically unrelated to Jackson, had a passion for the sea and for Cornwall. Her paintings of Staithes, a late-nineteenth-century artists’ colony in Yorkshire, included portrayals of fishing fleets and their laborers.
Early Career
Knight had a rough childhood, which was plagued by poverty, her father’s absence, and the loss of her sister. Her mother, Charlotte, on the other hand, encouraged her to paint and draw. She was an artist herself, and in exchange for free education, she taught at her daughter’s school. Knight’s skill allowed her to enroll in the Nottingham School of Art when she was just thirteen years old. She met Harold Knight, a fellow artist whom she would aim to imitate in technique and style, and whom she married in 1903.
Knight was mentored by Charles Hodge Mackie (1862-1920) while living in the artists’ colony in Staithes, who helped her develop her style by painting what she saw rather than mimicking other artists. Following the impact of the French Barbizon and Dutch Hague schools, the exodus to Staithes symbolized the rejection of academicism in late-nineteenth-century painting. A movement occurred toward portrayals of rural people and life, as well as the establishment of artistic centers inside these rural towns. The reality of working people in Staithes is Knight’s concern.
However, in 1907, the Knights relocated to Newlyn, Cornwall, another important artists’ colony. The pair would spend ten years in Cornwall, where they became involved with the Newlyn School, which included artists such as Stanhope Forbes (1857-1947) and Alfred Munnings (1878-1959). Knight’s palette became brighter in Newlyn, thanks to the iconic Cornish light, and her work became more hopeful and romantic than it had been at Staithes.
Kurt Jackson paints seascapes with every glint of reflected light on the water’s surface, rivers in a variety of moods and waterside colors of foliage, and trees in a variety of forms and light and shade patterns. His paintings are painstaking in their observation of nature minutiae, but they are also abstract expressions as emotive as the most crystalline poetry.
