Kurt Jackson: River: a 40-Year Project at The Base, Greenham
Kurt Jackson: River: a 40-Year Project at The Base, Greenham
Review by LIN WILKINSON
INTENSE observation is intrinsic to artists’ practice, with a return to certain motifs germane to many artists’ work. So it is with Kurt Jackson, who, for 40 years, has been focusing on rivers and waterways.
His subject matter, compositional methods and choice of media are conventional; his eye and visceral connection to the landscape quite individual. The show is both a hymn to the natural world, and a threnody for our continuing, reckless destruction of it.
For the most part the show comprises very large canvases, hung sparingly, so each has space in which to work. Exuding a sense of calm, they command the gallery space. Jackson works at all times of day, in all weathers and in ever-changing light, encapsulating the spirit and transitory moods of watery landscapes.
His sense of colour, and of colour balance, is central. Working in mixed-media, collage, acrylic, watercolour, etchings and drypoint, in varying landscapes in the UK and abroad, his projects often follow a river from its source to the sea, as with the Thames and Avon projects.
The works have thick material surfaces, alive and often scumbled.
They transmit a real sense of the physicality of the riverscapes, as well as having their own aesthetic heft. Paint is thickly layered, sprinkled and flicked, or scraped with sandpaper, spatula or fingernails. Jackson works fast, instinctively and physically, often on to horizontal canvases, bringing Jackson Pollock’s technique to mind.
Most of the work is semi-abstracted, an approach that brings an immediate sense of the elemental power of landscape to the viewer, as well as the shift and temporality of the subject.
As you enter the gallery, you are enveloped in the huge Up River, the Thames. An immense area of flowing water fills two-thirds of the canvas, the water’s surface silvery, lit by soft, grey English light.
Three very large works, in the central area of the gallery, are hung as a panel.
In similar colours and hues – sombre russets, reds and yellows – they work tellingly together. One from the Avon series is collaged with plastic detritus found at the water’s edge; a physical manifestation of man-made environmental degradation.
Source of the Liffey is entirely abstracted, a mélange of gestural strokes in saturated oranges, greens and blues. River Stour at Dedham, Essex is a dynamic composition of verticals, horizontals and colour-field areas.
Human figures are almost entirely absent. Where they are included, as in Evening Fish, Dordogne, they are tiny, almost incidental, suggesting how small human concerns are in the scheme of things, yet how much environmental damage we are doing. Dorset Stour, with its palpable sense of calm and peace, evokes Constable’s Suffolk landscapes. There’s masterly handling of composition and perspective in View from Dundas Aqueduct, with brilliant highlights as the eye moves towards the central vanishing point, a quasi-photographic handling of differential focus and depth of field.
Golden River, Isle has dazzling light through trees; Drôme River, stylistically more representational, depicts a pebbly, almost dry river bed.
Within a panel of four small-scale watercolours, there are two gems; small slices of South American logging areas, in hot yellows and oranges.
The show includes some of Jackson’s Cornish sketchbooks, and also showcases his published work.
An accompanying film, on the Thames and Forth projects, gives an insight into his working methods.
The exhibition runs until Sunday, August 6
Open Wednesday to Sunday 10am-5pm; last entry 4pm.
Entry £6.75; concessions).
