Every December and January, we invite our contributors, friends and comrades to look back over the last 12 months — resulting in the collective annual series known as Shadows & Reflections. Artist Kurt Jackson kicks off this year’s proceedings, sharing a 2024 filled with rivers and their music.
It seems appropriate to write this after what has been for me to be such a ‘rivery’ year. As an artist whose work is underpinned by a passion (and concern) for the natural world, watercourses tend to play a large role in my choice of subject matter and this year has been no exception.
Over the last few years I have been following a major Cornish river (which one is still under wraps!) as a reason to make a new body of work. One of the iconic Cornish rivers, she has been demanding my proper attention for decades, having only ever dabbled at the edges; this post-industrial and once overused watercourse has now become my focus.
On New Year’s Eve we were staying in a tiny cold utilitarian bungalow at the mouth of the large estuary; a wet and windy night, and at midnight I stood on the cliff edge, the sea on my left, the river to my right, hood up and cagouled, to try and paint the year’s end alongside the river’s own ending. Only a few fireworks lit up the town skyline opposite but the boats and ships in the harbour all memorably blared their horns to mark the moment.
A few months later I went searching for the source of this river only to find I was too late, it had just been bulldozed, flattened and the entire valley concreted over and hidden under a new multilane roadway. I met the farmer who had worked the once-upon-a-time fields and was now sadly moving on. I eventually found the first flowing waters in a culvert on the roadside heading for a small stream and the boggy woods of freedom. It can be with mixed emotions that I make these river journeys.
I have also been visiting the Lymington River in the New Forest, finding delightful sublime stretches to paint under the canopy of oaks. All so verdant and bucolic but the threat of Lyme Disease is always hanging over this place of deer, and eventually I succumbed — but there’s no such place as paradise!
In May, I was asked by Radio 4 to make a recording at Joyce’s Pool, the source of the Bristol Avon. I had spent 5 years, a decade or more ago, painting alongside the Avon and that had culminated in 2 exhibitions. Having talked about the cultural, ecological, atmospheric and maybe spiritual sides of springs and sources, we moved a mile or so downriver below the first sewerage plant — ‘The Water Recycling works’ — and saw for ourselves the over-nutrification and discolouration from the frequent and recent releases. Within 2 fields of her birth the river was being polluted. It was sobering stuff.
I had a few books published this year. One was Kurt Jackson’s River by Lund Humphries, a collection of my paintings, sculptures, writings and memories from over 40 years of wandering along watercourses in Cornwall, ‘up country’ and abroad — a sort of river retrospective. It was launched at the Royal Academy in their Amphitheatre where I gave a lecture and reading; a seemingly appreciative full house listened to my accounts of childhood and youth, then and now on the river and riverbanks, paints in hand. Biodiversity, topography, aesthetics and pollution.
Throughout this year I had been working on another series Flora, 150 years of Environmental Change with Penlee House Art Gallery and Museum in Penzance, using their collection of Newlyn School paintings as evidence of the botanical change in West Cornwall over the last century or so. I visited the location of chosen paintings and made my own work there and then discussed the plants that had vanished, grown rare or newly appeared with habitat and climate change, agricultural intensification and lack of grazing. I was advised by a number of Cornish botanists. Stanhope Forbes had painted at Relubbus Bridge over the Hayle River in the 1920s. Making my own paintings there I found that the same white patches of lichen on the bridge stonework in the paintings 100 years ago were still there, only maybe a little larger. However, on the banks it was a place of neophytes — plants that had newly arrived, colonised the banks, sometimes benignly but often negatively, as invasive species — mostly garden escapees or from the horticultural fields around. Nothing really stays the same, all habitats are dynamic, in transition, transient, especially when we get involved.
The exhibition, Valency Valley, currently showing at the Jackson Foundation Gallery in St Just, follows the small river that flows into Boscastle in North Cornwall that became infamous 20 years ago in that tempestuous event one summer. We had lived there in our youth and along the riversides in that valley was where I had learnt my craft and cut my artistic teeth. For the last five years I have buried myself in the nostalgia of revisiting and repainting my old backyard: the steep wooded valley of Thomas Hardy, the stream running over her slate bed, the temperate rainforest, and my memories for this show.
I wrote towards the end of the project: ‘I spend the day drawing on a bank of the Valency.
Big sheets of cartridge paper — but how to cover all that huge empty white space, fill that rectangle with just a pencil tip? It never seems possible at the beginning.
A frenzy of graphite. First the careful, observed, detailed notes of bubbles, lines of current, glints, sun spots, shadows and it gradually builds up. Erased, redrawn, layered; the surface, the bed, the depth, the flow, changing, moving, patterning with repeat. Both hands are busy trying to make sense, to translate, to put all this information down in front of me.
I use a fistful of pencils — multi-marking each stroke, I resort to adding ink washes, black and white, I dip it in the river, I make mop brushes with handfuls of grass stalks, I strike and scrub with a stick.
Repeating marks replicate ripples and riffles; it’s not just the form of the water but also the sounds — the music of the stream, that chitter-chatter, words of riverine conversation, talking to herself, commenting on her progress, her day, as she undulates over her uneven slate bed. Each and every slab of slate and piece of shingle equates to a movement of water and then a sound. Am I drawing sheets of music, music to be read? These lines, scribbles, dots and dashes. I only ever learnt to read the basics of music; struggled, was never fluid with my school recorder or harmonica, I never succeeded. But now I try to read river music and write it — a total immersion, the whole body concentrating, arched over my paper and board. I’m constantly convinced that I have company, I can hear voices behind me, nearby, making me look over my shoulder and around. But I am alone with the stream; there is the occasional wood pigeon and wagtail but that’s it. It’s the water that plays tricks on me, or does it? Who am I to say these are not words, songs, poems that have emotion and meaning and rhythm?
Is this the purist abstraction or the ultimate in representation?
It feels like both.’
Most of this year I have staggered around with a knackered knee; rewilding our fields had created not only new habitats with more interesting fauna and flora but also tussocks — trip hazards! And this limited my walking, even at Glastonbury Festival I was limited to being on only the main stages and in the nearby areas for painting and drawing. However, a fortnight ago I was given a new knee, a swap, and now I still stagger but am thankfully progressing in the right direction. Soon I will be back to striding across the moors, running with our cattle and following every meander on foot.