Kurt Jackson has for a long time been a champion of the environmental movement. Whilst his paintings, with their range of media and texture and their three dimensionality, are clear calls to experience the physicality of the world first hand – to get in there amongst it all, to realise that this landscape – so threatened as rivers so constantly are, is essential to life and to living. Like all the best landscape artists, Jackson helps us realise that nature isn’t something else, something distinct and different from us – it is a part of us. We’re all part of the river, and the river is part of us.
Kurt Jackson is an artist who has dedicated his career to exploring and recording our fragile landscape as it changes over time. This interest in change includes not only an awareness of the subtle gradations of light, mood and weather that makes him such a perceptive painter. He also possesses a passionate awareness of – and concern for – the more fundamental nature of humankind’s impact (for good and ill) upon the natural world: ecological evolution, variations in land use, habitat loss, conservation, preservation. David Boyd Haycock
