Kurt Jackson - Three Woods
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| Bell's Hat, oaks, robins, wrens, end of the day. September 2004. |
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Kurt Jackson is one of Britain’s leading landscape painters, best known for plein-air paintings of Cornwall. His dynamic work, created directly from nature, reflects his intense working methods and gives the viewer an unusually powerful sense of place.
Kurt Jackson’s fascination with woodland found a recent outlet in Two Woods, portrayals of two very different woods through the seasons: Skewjack in Cornwall and Ashcombe near Bath. He has now decided to extend the project to include another area with which he has a strong emotional connection - the woodland of the New Forest.
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Screech of Jays, Bell's Hat.
September 2004. |
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Jackson explains his particular interest in the remarkable and tragic story behind some of these tranquil beech woods: “My links with the New Forest go back to when I was very young and lived for a short spell near Southampton. During this time my father worked in an art shop and became friends with the artist Sven Berlin. My parents would then visit him in the forest and meet the Gypsies he knew and had lived with.” Back in the 1950s and 1960s Berlin had developed a close relationship with the Gypsies of Shave Green, who had been forced to abandon their traditional travelling life in the open forest for a compound at Shave Green, described by Picture Post magazine in 1949 as "slums under the trees".
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| Wood Pidgeon coo, distant pony whinney. Bell's Hat. Skinny Oak, late sunlight. September 2004. |
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Kurt Jackson has painted alongside Travellers on a number of occasions over the last twenty years and the eerie stillness of this once crowded wood also makes it a perfect subject for an artist best known for the intensity of his landscapes. Jackson’s dynamic interpretation of the New Forest at Shave Green, Bell’s Hat, Hollands Wood and the Lymington River captures the changing atmosphere of Hampshire’s woodland from stark winter days to the glowing green of spring.
Three Woods includes some of Jackson’s paintings of Skewjack and Ashcombe, combined with 21 New Forest paintings to provide a comprehensive insight into the artist’s ability to get under the skin (or bark) of England’s historic woodland.
Naturalist and author Richard Mabey comments that "these are landscapes seen literally from the grass roots. You’re in a thicket, meshed by greenery…but perhaps most impressive is his painterly translation of the ecology of wild places. In his woodland studies the patterns of light and shade, the thickness and invasiveness of the paint, the sudden detonations of colour and embryonic forms, echo the vitality of the natural processes they signify".
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