Two series of new paintings from two different residencies on Scottish islands by Kurt Jackson will be shown for the first time in London this December. One painted in and around George Orwell’s former home, Barnhill on the coast of the Isle of Jura – a remote and isolated house where time has stood still and the location for the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The other in a traditional ‘blackhouse’ on the Isle of Skye, a small thatched croft house in a crofting township.
“I was aware of the Scottish blackhouses of old, the “tigh-dubh.” I had read about the homes of the crofters that were built with the materials to hand, thatched, low local stone walls, dumpy and sturdy, they were the vernacular architecture,” he says. “[Now] forlorn, sinking back into where they came from.”
