Bill Jacklin
Chatting over Zoom as he recovers from appendicitis, the Royal Academician tells STEVE PILL about classic scrapes in New York and his recent experiments with illustration
As many of us have found ourselves unable to focus on bigger artistic statements during the pandemic and embarking on unexpected little creative projects instead, it is perhaps reassuring to find one of the western world’s leading painters has been doing just the same. Bill Jacklin is famed for his vast urban canvases that hang in the Tate, the Royal Academy and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and he has regularly completed major projects for the likes of the Bank of England, The Ivy restaurant and Washington National Airport, where a 24-foot mural graces the north terminal. Like the rest of us, however, he found himself scaling back his ambitions during the Covid restrictions and returning to more personal ideas closer to home.
For years, Bill had been working off and on in private on a graphic novel about an
“animal creature” for his adopted daughter. With about 100 drawings stockpiled, he was keen to flesh out the story further, so he approached Simon Astaire, his son-in-law from his first marriage and a novelist in his own right. The first draft captured the artist’s imagination in unexpected ways.
“It turned out that, more and more, his story was strong in its own right, so we chose to put that [first idea] to one side,” Bill explains. “Gradually, as his story strengthened, I enjoyed finding images and visuals that complemented and pushed the story, which is something that’s very different from what I normally try to do.”
The result is Cressida’s Dream, an artist’s book that tells the rather fragmented and illusory story of 16-year-old girl Cressida, largely from her father’s perspective. It is set “in the near future”, yet in truth the sense of time feels rather elastic with modern references to hashtags and Wikipedia alongside rather nostalgic nods to photo booths, railway compartments and Grahame Greene novels. Bill’s paintings for the book range in style throughout, from modest watercolour-and-pastel illustrations through to larger oil paintings more in keeping with his gallery work. This artist’s book will be displayed alongside Bill’s latest watercolours, oils and monoprints in an exhibition, also titled Cressida’s Dream, at Ordovas, a gallery run by Simon’s wife
Pilar Ordovas on London’s stylish Savile Row.
The book’s creative process was very much a symbiotic one, as new passages of text inspired artworks that in turn suggest new avenues for Simon’s writing. “I think if you’re doing something like this, you have to be open to possibilities,” says Bill. “Trying to find a visual equivalent of what’s happening in the story would be a challenge and
THIS IMAGE Before the Dance Great Lawn II, 1999, oil on canvas, 152x127cm OPPOSITE PAGE, INSET Train with Light [Cressida's Dream], oil on canvas, 41x51cm
sometimes I couldn’t do it. But for the most part, Simon and I hit off against each other.”
Working as an illustrator of sorts was, he says, a very freeing experience because it offered an opportunity to put aside his usual identity – “in my case, Bill Jacklin, painter of light” – and create new imagery without any expectations. He likens it to the situation he found himself in during the early 1970s, when he developed a visual language consisting of repeating geometric shapes that he used to create a series of minimal abstract canvases. “I found the systems within which I was working in at that time were far too restrictive, so I had to destroy the whole thing almost in order to reinvent myself again. If you get too locked into how you see the world or how you work or even how you talk to people, you have to stop and ask yourself: ‘Is this who I am?’”
Exactly who Bill Jacklin is has changed throughout his long and varied career to date. Born in London in 1943, he realised art was a compulsion from an early age after his mother gave him a set of paints and he promptly disappeared to Hampstead Heath for the day to paint. “I think I was about eight years old,” he recalls. “I didn’t come home all day and [my parents] were beside themselves worrying where I was. I did this whole painting and I still remember making it – it was near the Spaniard’s Inn and it had a certain resonance, the light hitting the buildings.
The perspective was all wrong but what I captured was real, it wasn’t concocted.”
Chatting over Zoom from his new studio in Rhode Island, USA, “concocted” is a word that Bill returns to several times during our conversation to describe the antithesis of what he is searching for in his own work. Rather than inventing an image, his paintings and prints have always involved a direct and rather emotional response to his immediate environment.
This quest for realism took him to Walthamstow College of Art in 1960, when fellow students included singer Ian Dury and film directors Peter Greenaway and Ken Russell, and Bill was taught by Peter Blake and Anthony Eyton RA [see issue 439].
“The spotlight was shining on Walthamstow at that time,” he recalls. “It was before they were closing art schools and stopping parttime teachers so a lot of the people who were teaching you were practising artists, they were real. It wasn’t academic.”
After a brief and apparently depressing stint as a graphic designer at Holborn’s
Studio Seven, which involved working on British rail posters and “a lot of things that I thought were appalling”, Bill decided to return to painting and three years at the Royal College of Art followed. A visit to a Robert Rauschenberg exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1964 prompted Bill to write part of his thesis on the American artist’s work. “And suddenly I painted Rauschenbergs for a while too,” he notes.
Yet even at their most abstract, Bill’s early Systems paintings were, he says, about
“the movement of light” and how it informs surfaces. Nevertheless, the minimal
“I enjoyed finding images and visuals that complemented and pushed the story”
language he had developed was proving limited and his work became gradually more figurative throughout the 1970s. “If you’re any great observer of the human condition, you realise that you change every day,” he says. “I wanted to be closer to my emotional life on any given day. So, if I was feeling a certain way, I wanted to paint that way.”
Bill’s breakthrough came in 1985 when he decided to move to Manhattan. “In the 1980s, New York was a rougher place and that was what attracted me to it, quite frankly,” he says. “I found, for want of a better word, a muse.”
Making regular trips to “42nd Street, sex shops, all these sleazy places” with his photographer friend Abe Frajndlich, the pair would take turns to distract the various salubrious characters while the other drew or took pictures. “I did a whole series of drawings in Grand Central Station late at night and if I drew someone directly, they came at me,” explains Bill. “I developed this way of looking sideways and drawing in my sketchbook. I had all kind of ploys.”
Going to such dangerous lengths may sound unnecessary but Bill insists these in situ drawings were a vital part of the reference gathering process for his largescale studio canvases. “A photograph gave me all the information I needed, but it didn’t give me the rhythm,” he explains. “I had to be there to draw the flow of the people and the feeling of being in that space.”
The early 1990s were a good time for
Bill professionally as he was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London and also became the official artist-in-residence for the British Council in Hong Kong. “That was an extraordinary time, before the Chinese took over,” he says. “I spent most of my time in the streets drawing. It was a subject that fascinated me because it was so rough and raw.” It was during this period that Bill and his second wife adopted a daughter from Vietnam and his new family enjoyed the expat lifestyle. “I was born in the latter part of the war, so we were always moving, and I’ve always continued it. I always like being somewhere else. The art world is quite insular and maybe it is just in my nature to go to different places and see different things.”
Back in the US, this Englishman in New York became an inveterate watcher of crowds at work and play, from the ice skaters in Central Park and the day-trippers at Coney Island beach to the commuters at Grand Central Station. In each case the individuals are depicted as if part of some larger pattern at work, shifting organically through the light and space mapped out in his canvases like
“A photograph didn’t give me rhythm… I had to be there to draw the flow of the people and the feeling of being in that space”
a murmuration of starlings swirling in the twilight. The larger works made during this period, such as 1999’s Before the Dance Great Lawn II, will surely go down as Bill’s masterpieces, the most perfect distillation of his interests. The dappled light is suggestive of a higher power and the painterly control of soft and hard edges encourages the viewer’s eye to dance among the crowds and never settle. Snowstorms, bridges and the canyons of light between skyscrapers were all employed as devices in subsequent works, each a new setting for his masterful command of light and space.
Bill has just recovered from appendicitis – “I was rushed off to hospital, sirens wailing,” he says proudly – and we speak on one of his first days back in his new studio. He tilts his computer screen to show us the room, part of an old schoolhouse with high ceilings: “It’s relatively modest, but it’s a nice space.”
Bill’s family moved to Rhode Island from Connecticut to be closer to his mother-in-law and living in the “Ocean State” has seen the sea creep regularly into his recent paintings, particularly at night. “My studio is full of, for want of a better word, abstractions but if you look at a lot of even my most figurative
paintings, there is an underlying geometry that belies the figuration.”
Aside from the book illustrations, Bill’s latest canvases are perhaps the most purely abstract paintings he has produced in four decades, but he maintains that this is purely coincidental. “I’m not thinking in terms of just going in that direction, but I might just show them altogether and to hell with the consequences,” he chuckles. “You’re going to get critiqued whichever which way you go.” Cressida’s Dream: New Work by Bill Jacklin RA runs from 2 February to 22 April at Ordovas, London. www.billjacklinartist.com