For Kurt Jackson ‘Painting the sea could become an obsession, an entire oeuvre in its own right, an endless life absorbing task’.

And, as this book attests, Jackson’s dedication to capturing its constant shape shifting – stillness to thundering force, shallows to mysterious depths – has brought forth paintings that communicate the sea’s ebb and flow, its magic and elusiveness.

Kurt Jackson’s Sea captures the beauty of the artist’s constantly evolving relationship with one of nature’s most challenging subjects. Two hundred colour images complement Jackson’s reflections on his interactions with inspirational coastal landscapes – largely experienced in his native Cornwall, but stretching way beyond the county too.

Kurt Jackson’s Sea is published June 7th 2021 by Lund Humphries and features a foreward by award-winning art writer Julian Spalding, who pinpoints the importance of Jackson’s artistic voice at a time of environmental emergency.

Kurt Jackson’s Sea
Release date: June 7th 2021.
Signed copies available from Kurt Jackson Editions.

Kurt Jackson: Biodiversity
Signed copies available from Kurt Jackson Editions.

This booklet accompanies the hugely successful Frenchman’s Creek exhibition.

Produced to complement his paintings from the show, this collection of drawings and poems – all previously unpublished or reproduced – is a limited signed edition of 250. Tightly edited and designed in association with the artist, this will be the first in a series of poetry collections by Kurt Jackson.

Signed copies of Kurt Jackson’s Botanical Landscape are available from Kurt Jackson Editions.

Kurt Jackson’s Botanical Landscape – which features a forward by Tim Smit and an introduction by Robert Macfarlane – is a new collection of poems, paintings, drawings, sculptures and printmaking by the artist and staunch environmentalist: responses to his engagement with and rich experience within the natural world of flora.

From day-to-day plants – weeds, the flowers in the hedge, familiar trees and the vegetable garden – to the more unusual, twisted forms and strange fruit of the undergrowth, Jackson’s works celebrate the staggering diversity of the plant kingdom.

For the art enthusiast, the naturalist, the gardener and the armchair horticulturist, Kurt Jackson’s Botanical Landscape maps a particularly expressive communion with nature and offers a unique and beguiling interpretation of the natural world.

Signed copies of Kurt Jackson’s Botanical Landscape are available from Kurt Jackson Editions.

For this book, Jackson has returned to zoology, the subject he studied at Oxford university, to create a beautiful bestiary: a body of work about fauna. Jackson’s contemporary bestiary extends the religious medieval tradition, looking closely at both everyday and lesser-known species of birds, insects, mammals and fish in order to stimulate readers’ connections with and appreciation of the world around them.

Signed copies of Kurt Jackson: A Cornish Bestiary is available from Kurt Jackson Editions and all good book stockists.

The book documents the Place Project – a collaboration between the visual artist Kurt Jackson and 32 contemporary writers. Jackson invited each writer to choose, and then justify in words a Place in Britain. Then, in an epic series of journeys Jackson visited and worked at each chosen location responding with a series of paintings, drawings and sculptures.

Contributors  and their chosen places include Andy Atkins, Director, Friends of the Earth  (Royal Festival Hall);  Mark Cocker, nature writer (Blackwater Carr, Norfolk); Ian Collins, art critic (Bat Hall, Dorset); Jim Crace, writer (Spaghetti Junction); Helen Dunmore, writer/poet (Paddington station); Michael Eavis, farmer and festival organiser (Worthy Farm, Glastonbury Festival site); Patrick Gale, writer (A30,West Cornwall) Jimmy Goodwin, musician (Wapley Hill Fort, Herefordshire); Robert Macfarlane, writer  (Cairngorm);  John Vidal, journalist (The Panorama, Llangollen); Bob Wilson, Director, Greenpeace (River Ouse, Ely).

The project shows not only the diversity of British landscape but more fundamentally will give insights into the concept of Place – the sense of Place, encompassing that collective sense of identity, meaning, longing, nostalgia and attachment within the British psyche.

Kurt Jackson: Place is currently out of print but available from second-hand book stockists.

The exhibited works of Kurt Jackson do not necessarily reveal his day-to-day working practice. Behind his finished canvases are hundreds of sketchbooks borne out of his continual routine of making drawings, marks, notes, poems and scribbles. This book, newly available in paperback, examines the importance of the sketchbook to Jackson.

For Jackson, sketchbooks are vital to the development and completion of his paintings. Often sketching while a painting evolves, the artist values each medium equally – the pages of his sketchbooks reveal how the hastily executed images can help him to work out what he wants to achieve on canvas, or simply capture a spontaneous image when there is not enough time to paint or draw properly. Illustrating mundane daily events and happenings as well as key moments, journeys and the overlapping ongoing project work, Jackson’s sketchbooks are key to understanding his inspirations as an artist.

Drawing on a selection of 20 sketchbooks, of differing sizes and a variety of media, this fascinating publication provides a rare insight in to the mind of a highly creative and original artist.

Signed copies of Kurt Jackson: Sketchbooks are available from Kurt Jackson Editions and all good book stockists.

‘My scrawls, jottings, lines, poems occur when I’m not scribbling and sketching… when I’m not painting and drawing… or when I’m not sculpting and printmaking. They appear as lines on beer mats in pubs, on scraps in my pocket, on a pad kept by my bed. Thoughts, feelings, conversations, read or heard phrases, stuff that falls out of my head as the written word instead of as a brush stroke or a pencil mark. Why ‘and’? Because of all of the above but also maybe because a lot of the first lines seem to start with that word.’ – Kurt Jackson

Originally printed to celebrate his 50th birthday in 2011, this is the only printed collection of Kurt Jackson’s poetry so far.

Signed copies of and are available from Kurt Jackson Editions.

Exploring the career to date of artist and environmentalist Kurt Jackson, this visually rich publication, now available as an attractive paperback, has at its centre the artist and the natural world. Jackson’s paintings are set in places that he has travelled to and explored regularly, and are created by an individual with a deep understanding of natural history and ecology, politics and environmental issues.

Described in the Financial Times as ‘one of Britain’s most compelling contemporary painters’, Jackson has had a distinguished career spanning almost 30 years. An Oxbridge graduate in zoology, Jackson travelled widely before settling in Cornwall in 1984 both to immerse himself in the arts and become more involved in his commitment to the environment. For Jackson, the fleeting impression is not of interest – in all his paintings his aim is to convey his feelings and sense of awareness of a particular environment that he knows intimately. Offering insights into the extensive range of materials and techniques that the artist uses, Kurt Jackson provides the definitive account of this fascinating artist’s career to date and as such is essential reading for anyone interested in 21st-century British art. Includes 90 colour and 40 b&w illustrations, with contributions from eleven authors.

A New Genre of Landscape Painting is currently out of print but available from second-hand book stockists.