Jethro Jackson: Moor Lands
Projects Twenty Two | 13 August - 6 September 2025
Altair Brandon-Salmon
How to paint? It’s the question every artist must face—a matter of wrestling an image out of pigment, laboriously, the paint its own force which the artist must contend with. In Jethro Jackson’s work, the burrs of paint stand proud from the surface, leaving a rough texture that calls out to the audience to run its hand over the crags of paint. This is the pull, the dangerous seduction, of paint which can beguile audience and viewer alike.
This perhaps accounts for the often-shocking beauty of Jackson’s painting: in Moor Lands, there are electric yellows, ice purples, reds like blood clots, browns full of rich, creamy tones. It’s a Technicolor profusion, born out of a deep engagement with North Cornwall, but Jackson does not want to create a window into that landscape, but rather he attempts to conjure up a portal through which the audience can enter into a world of his own making.
A black bird the colour of a bruise sitting on a fence post, surrounded by other birds below, could be the emblem of Jackson’s whole project (figure 1). It’s a potent omen, the artist cast as the all-seeing avian eye, seeking out its prey across the terrain. Yet the cajoling birds seem to threaten the scene’s hierarchy. Everything is provisional here. Nature is not to be sentimentalised but seen as a series of existential battles between different creatures. The land becomes a furrowed topography, where animals hide in the paint itself, only seen on the third or fourth glance, surprises ready to leap out of the surface.
So one of Jackson’s strategies is to leave the viewer unsettled, unable to take anything for granted in the work. In that sense his painting offers a rhyme with the moors of North Cornwall—the undulating land hides a profusion of life, battling for survival, only rarely breaking for cover. He’s uninterested, though, in painting a specific, identifiable environment, en plein air, like an Impressionist. These are works made in a studio, with all that implies: concentration, second thoughts, radical revisions. It is a crucible of creativity and in the paintings themselves, sometimes shadows of previous approaches can be glimpsed underneath the layers of paint, slowly accumulated so that there’s a sculptural quality to the work, the paint having a weight and a presence in the gallery. Jackson will often walk or sit in the land, taking in his environment and create a series of mental images from his surroundings, that he then seeks to translate through paint in his studio. That gap between vision and action is perhaps the central tension in the work—he paints by holding back. That’s a counterintuitive formulation when the viewer sees the force of colour and form in his paintings, but it is by allowing the world to marinate in himself as a series of memories, that he can then break free from mimicking the world and creating his own.
This means it’s important to think about Jackson’s work beyond the usual coordinates of Cornish painting. Cornwall is no pastoral salve, or romantic haven, but an elemental, forceful landscape, intensely alive, where people and animals can often be interchangeable forms stalking the land. It suggests a postwar modernist like Peter Lanyon, who created his own distance by taking to the sky in gliders, which led to work such as Soaring Flight (1960), seeking to convey the experience of flight through the swipes of brushstrokes, loaded with blue and red oil paint. Paint and sensation become intertwined, just as in a small painting by Jackson of a sheep’s head (figure 2), its eyes meeting the viewer’s. This is what it feels like to be addressed by a non-human consciousness. These are not experiences which find an easy vocabulary, but somehow are able to be transformed into paint, creating an object which can embody these experiences.
Standing with Jackson and seeing Leon Kossoff’s large drawing Willesden Junction (c.1965/66) in a gallery in London, I began to see how his mind worked. Moving backward and forward, tracking Kossoff’s mark-making, he was bewitched by the work. The hurtling, vertiginous lines of the train tracks sucked him and I into the drawing, off towards the dark, ambiguous horizon. John Berger remarked to Kossoff that works like this ‘are coming from their own place, like the train between Kilburn and Willesden Green’. He was the master at finding those in-between spaces where a city is revealed most fully. There is something frightening about Kossoff’s drawing, frightening in representing this bleak, disconsolate world, frightening in its allure. Here, I discovered later, was the difficult balance that Jackson sought in his own painting, where fear and beauty could not be easily separated. It’s a way of looking at nature that emphasises its wilderness, and its unruliness.
This connection with postwar art is more just a result of Jackson’s magpie-like eye. The art critic Hal Foster has written about the ‘barbarians’ of artmaking after the Second World War—figures like Jean Dubuffet and Eduardo Paolozzi—who ‘annihilate’ their subjects in order to ‘illuminate’ the world. In the wake of a global conflagration, the cultural assumptions that had sustained art in Europe for so long could not be maintained; the precarity of the body came to the forefront. As in the work of Francis Bacon during the 1940s and 1950s, the body itself seemed to be in the process of metamorphosis, turning from a human into a creature. Jackson senses, too, that the gap between human and animal is smaller than usually thought. In one painting, a goat is shown in dark purple, silhouetted against the sun (figure 3). Its head twists around, in a mixture of curiosity and weariness. Birds and sheep traverse the landscape beyond the goat. It shows an entire society, as dense and complicated as humanity’s. Indeed, the vividness with which Jackson portrays animals’ watchfulness subverts the notion that it is people who behold the landscape. It is we who are beholden by nature and its envoys.
This is the illumination—the shaft of light—which cuts across the paint. In Moor Lands, Jackson has found a vision which emphasises the agency of nature, independent of humanity. They have a wondrous presence before the viewer. In a large, horizontal work anchored by another of Jackson’s vivacious goats, outlined in white on a mottled orange background (figure 4), the animals have all the primal energy of the prehistoric petroglyphs found at the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave in France or the Cave of Beasts in Egypt. It means that the painting steps out of the contemporary moment and into another time. Robert Macfarlane has talked about how the world exists in ‘deep time’, ‘measured in units that humble the human instant: epochs and aeons, instead of minutes and years.’ It is the time of evolution and of geology, which throws humanity and its societies into insignificance. For Macfarlane, ‘a deep time awareness might help us see ourselves as part of a web of gift, inheritance and legacy stretching over millions of years past and millions to come’.He exhorts people to see the natural world as far more integrated into people’s lives, to better understand that history should not just encompass the rise and fall of regimes, but far more consequential, the rhythms and cycles of the planet itself. Jackson is perhaps less sure of such recuperation of nature—he doesn’t shy away from the violent struggle to survive which defines so many animals’ lives. Yet clearly his work sees little distinction between creature and human. That accounts, at least in part, for the ferocity of this painting. Not just through the rapid brushwork, or the vigorous application of colour, but the way the goat becomes an icon of the whole exhibition: it’s seen as through an X-ray, with its ribs visible, leaden with the mass of paint, conjuring up an independent presence before the viewer.
Whose land does the audience traverse in Moor Lands? Jackson’s land, of course. The works are alive with the buzz and hum of energy and emotion, these objects of pigment and board congealing before the audience’s eyes into something approaching the presence of a living creature. He finds life where the viewer least expects it.
Frank Auerbach in 1959 described his process as a painter as ‘a practical day-to-day thing… It is a serious thing—like religion—like love—one does the persistent thing, and then the really remarkable happens when something’s there that wasn’t there before.’ That’s the great trick of painting, pulling out of the blank void of the surface, a life into being. No wonder the Biblical language of creation is so often used to describe what an artist does. How to paint? How do you breathe? Jackson channels all of the force of life itself in his painting.
Bibliography
Frank Auerbach, ‘Fragments from a Conversation’ (1959), in David Wright, ed., An Anthology from X: A Quarterly Review of Literature and the Arts, 1959-1962, edited by Patrick Swift and David Wright (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 22-26.
John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists, ed. Tom Overton (London and New York: Verso, 2015).
Hal Foster, Brutal Aesthetics: Dubuffet, Bataille, Jorn, Paolozzi, Oldenburg (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2020).
Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey(London: Hamish Hamilton, 2019).