Roy Jackson Retrospective

ROY JACKSON ART RETROSPECTIVE

By Chris Borton

Distinguished Australian landscape artist, Roy Jackson, is the subject of three separate but overlapping exhibitions in Sydney during March and April.

Roy Jackson at an exhibition of his work

The first of these is a retrospective covering the years 1963 – 2013 at S. H. Ervin Gallery in the Rocks at Observatory Hill. This exhibition follows a previous exhibition of a Roy Jackson retrospective at The Drill Hall Gallery in Canberra in 2013. This exhibition runs from 27 February – 12 April 2015.

The second exhibition is a series of selected works from between 1999 – 2004 and takes place at Defiance Gallery in Newtown, Sydney from 11 March – 4 April 2015.

The third exhibition is of large scale paintings and coincides with the launch of a monograph Roy Jackson – Hands On at Yellow House Gallery in Potts Point, Sydney from 25 March – 12 April.

Roy Jackson was born in England in 1944 and migrated to Australia in 1959 with his family at age 15. Aboard the ship bringing Jackson to Australia was noted Australian abstract-expressionist painter Ron Lambert who was returning home after a sojourn in Europe. Jackson sought out Lambert during the voyage and Lambert became Jackson’s first art mentor, eventually establishing him in a studio on the South Coast near Thirroull south of Sydney where Jackson began his life-long love of the Australian bush.

Roy Jackson “Alongaline”

Jackson’s long term studio was in Wedderburn near Campbelltown where he lived from 1975 until his death in 2013. He lived amidst his beloved bush amongst other artists who painted the landscape including John Peart and Elisabeth Cummings. His dialogue with the landscape was a constant in his life and he took his sketchbooks with him in all his many travels and was constantly drawing and painting the landscapes he saw and recording his impressions throughout his life. These sketchbooks form an integral and fascinating part of the retrospective exhibition at the SH Ervin Gallery and provide a unique insight into his process.

Jackson’s work was not derived from his sketchbooks as templates, however, but was spontaneously created by an improvisational process of mark- making closely related to the process by which jazz musicians make music by building lines as they progress and each moment and movement inspires the next one.

Jackson’s influences were many, including Greek and Roman philosophers and music. The poetry of TS Eliot and Aboriginal art were also influences and inspirations throughout his working life. His artistic influences included Ian Fairweather and Tony Tuckson, as well as French artist Jean Dubuffet
and Dutch-American Willem de Kooning. Jackson’s work could include abstracted “writing” combined with textures, pulsations and rhythms. Colleague and friend John Peart described Jackson’s art as an ebb and flow of abstraction and representation thriving in symbiosis.

Jackson’s final masterpieces, created in the last year of his life, are on display at the SH Ervin Gallery. They are the Clinamen series envisaged as a series of 6 large works of which only three were completed before Jackson’s death in 2013. These works are the flowering of a mature artist in his prime, expressing the accumulated genius of his lifetime’s work and experience.

It is a rare privilege indeed for Sydney to have the opportunity to see three exhibitions of this calibre.

Photography courtesy of Stephen Oxenbury
Estate of Roy Jackson
Represented by Defiance Gallery, Sydney in NSW

www.shervingallery.com.au
www.defiancegallery.com

CHRISTOPHER BORTON