A PRODUCT OF ENVIRONMENT
Entering Kurt Jackson's Foundation Gallery in St Just, Cornwall feels so much like being outside that it's as if you have merely crossed an invisible threshold to enter the physical space. The gallery so deeply reflects the external environments that inspire the artworks on the walls that it dissolves any conscious partition between exterior and interior. Jackson's exhibition space—a repurposed industrial building—is also so discreetly and harmoniously sandwiched between old traditional mining cottages that its unassuming facade in no way prepares you for the grand dimensions inside, where you might just as easily be in London, Paris, or New York, except better, because here you can see the distinct heathery purple moorland on the horizon beyond its windows.
Although Jackson is now such a recognised master of his form that he has become a Cornish institution, it's a testament to his unfailing brilliance that the quality and volume of his productivity defy any complacency from even the most seasoned observer of his work, continuing to take one's breath away with the sheer natural beauty of it all.
I did also notice an increasing emphasis on flecks and scratches in the many canvases of rivers and woods in his latest exhibition, Valency Valley. It seemed as if the artist's variety of effects in depicting the landscapes he so cherishes has become both more elaborate and yet somehow more spontaneously intuitive, as though the environments he paints are now so much a part of his own muscle memory as to be ingrained as deeply as the weathering patterns on Cornish rock.
There's certainly no doubt in my mind that if one were ever to reanimate Cornwall in the event of some form of nuclear annihilation, it could be done effectively by reconstructing the landscapes from these glorious artworks of Kurt Jackson. Of course, we don't need such an extreme to measure the genius of Jackson's work, but it makes the point that he has honoured Cornwall so completely that, through his art, he has become the totality of it.