BILL JACKLIN

“Is it true that anything can be changed, seen in any light,
and is not destroyed by the action of shadows?”
–John Cage, 1961 [1]

“Each time I make a line I hope to reach out to both
the physical world and the metaphysical world.”
–Bill Jacklin, 1971 [2]

Margaret Priest, a fellow student at Walthamstow Art School in the 1960s, recalls Bill Jacklin carrying a giant sketchbook – at three feet by three feet, it was so large that he had to bind it himself – for his ‘outsize outdoor drawing project’.[3] This ‘outdoor drawing’ has led Jacklin around the world, from Hampstead Heath, where he began to record his observations as a child, across London to New York and elsewhere in the United States, and to Venice and Hong Kong. Elected a Royal Academician in 1991 as a painter, Bill Jacklin has brought the drawn line to the heart of his practice. As an artist who paints in series, and often on an ambitious scale, it is through print that Jacklin has developed his ideas, whether through the monotypes he makes alongside paintings in his studio, or in portfolios such as the Anemones or Coney Island suites that are signal moments in his career.

Printmaking has formed a significant part of Jacklin’s work from the outset. When he applied to the Royal College of Art in 1964 (having completed his National Diploma in Design at Walthamstow), it was to the printmaking department. This fell under the aegis of the graphics school and at the time the curriculum was ‘conservative’. [4] Jacklin had already studied lettering at Walthamstow and, needing to support himself financially, had worked as a graphic designer, firstly at the advertising agency Studio Seven, and then freelancing for major firms such as Ogilvy & Mather. He had no desire to repeat his earlier lessons, so he left the printmaking department, and – with the support of Peter Blake [5]– reapplied for the painting school the following year. Yet graphics were to feature strongly in his final degree show. In Wall Environment (1967) the studio wall served as a base painting, hung with screenprints depicting a fire hydrant, a bucket and other mundane objects that were present in the space. Jacklin’s ‘collaged’ reflections of everyday reality reveal the influence of Robert Rauschenberg,[6] who had begun to screen print images onto his canvases after being introduced to the technique by Andy Warhol in the early 1960s.

Jacklin’s first experiments with print were not confined to this fashionable new technique. His most exciting student work is widely acknowledged to be Invitation Card (1963). Although the title might suggest otherwise, this is a three-dimensional work: a box containing six toy soldiers, in various stages of material breakdown. Jacklin recalls that he ‘made all the figures, shot them up with a .22 rifle, put acid on them by degrees, same as I might do with an aquatint, and the last one I gave a medal to’. This progressive degradation and decoration is early evidence of Jacklin’s interest in series, repetition and erasure – concerns that were to be the foundation of his graphic work. In Soldiers II (1963), a lithograph made the same year, the six mechanical figures appear in reverse: the violence exerted upon them expressed by jittery white lines scratched around the cuboid heads and the diminishing area of each khaki torso. Already Jacklin saw the possibilities of developing his ideas across different media.

The medals awarded to the last soldier in Invitation Card were a gift from Peter Blake, but they recall the Military Cross and the Croix de Guerre with which Jacklin’s father was decorated during the First World War. The honours Harold Jacklin received could not obliterate his harrowing experience of conflict, which had contributed to the schizophrenia and alcoholism that were apparent by the time of his second marriage, to Jacklin’s mother Alice, in 1935. Jacklin was born in 1943, during the Second World War, ‘when the Doodlebugs were dropping on London’[7]. He describes the culture of the post-war era in which he grew up as that of ‘the old existentialists’, figures like Jean-Paul Sartre who held that human existence was characterised by angst. Jacklin’s own unstable childhood did nothing to counteract this bleak view of the world, but he resolved to ‘aspire to the light’. In this he followed the example of Sartre, who in Nausea uses light to articulate a sudden comprehension of existence: ‘I exist. It is so soft, so soft, so slow. And light: it seems as though it suspends in the air. It moves.’[8]

After leaving the RCA Jacklin began work on abstract drawings, such as Shadows (1968–69) and Somme (1970). He developed a form of precise markmaking, working with a fine black Rapidograph pen on plastic, but also occasionally in watercolour. The drawings were composed slowly, some taking as long as three months to complete. He carefully built up minute strokes and dots to form images of ‘molecular complexity’.[9] These drawings led critics to describe Jacklin as a ‘systems artist’ or a ‘minimal abstractionist’,[10] but, a true existentialist, he eschews categorisation, preferring to say only that these works examine ‘the flow of forms and the play of light’.

From the first, Jacklin was interested in the technical aspects of his trade. It is no surprise that the young artist who announced his main theme as being ‘the effects of matter on matter’[11] should take his investigation of ‘the play of light’ into the printmaking studio. The systems drawings were followed by nine meticulous etchings, the Gradatim suite (1971),[12] and then by a series of mezzotints, the Rocker suite (1973).[13] The critic John Russell observed that the former looked ‘as if they had been made by a very intelligent ant, so close and persistent is the regular snick, snick of the marks on the plate; […] the drawings tack from warm to cool, and from a cloudy vagueness to the kind of precision that is taught at the nearby barracks’.[14] He concluded: ‘there is evidence of a poetic imagination backed by determined hard work’.[15] Jacklin’s capacity for hard work is especially evident in his dedication to grounding (or rocking) his own mezzotint plates. This was rare among his contemporaries: ‘You would usually pay someone to do it for you, unless you were crazy like me.’ It was an arduous process, moving the rocker through ‘every angle on the compass to get a symmetrical crosssection of burrs’ to achieve the rich velvet black of mezzotint. The geometric forms in the Rocker suite[16] are self-referential: the lines and angles in each image correspond to those on the rocking chart used to prepare the plate. Once the plate has been rocked, an artist has to work out the pressure needed to erase the burrs to create the correct tonal shifts from dark to light. Some artists will return to the black areas and rerock them after erasing; Jacklin was highly disciplined, and got it right first time. The references to blues music in titles like Rocking My Blues Away and Rocking Along the Line suggest that Jacklin enjoyed achieving visual harmonies through this monotonous, rhythmic process; the puns add a light-hearted flourish to what is often perceived as one of the more austere intaglio techniques.

Although the systems works brought him recognition, after several years Jacklin – who places change at the core of his life and work – decided to return to figuration. In his monograph of Jacklin, John Russell Taylor notes that the Anemones suite (1977) is a key work in the artist’s transition from abstraction to figuration; he compares its significance to ‘the process by which Mondrian reached abstraction by painting a gradually dying chrysanthemum’.[17] Yet these seven etchings represent continuity too: an exploration of light and repeat patterns, and a dedication to technical precision. The printing (with Michael Rand at the RCA, with whom Jacklin had also editioned the Rocker suite) was even more rigorously planned than the artist’s systems work. The subtle gradations of tone that distinguish the shadows cast by the vase and the fallen petals were achieved through a painstaking, although ‘satisfying’, process, done ‘all in one go’, of twelve bites of aquatint. As the series progresses, the petals of the anemones drop, darkness falls and overnight the realistic petals transform into imagined abstract shapes which perform a ‘dance’ that evokes Jacklin’s own shift into and out of figuration. In the final two prints the petals assume a geometric order that both recalls the systems drawings and anticipates Jacklin’s future concerns.

At the RCA Jacklin studied Western philosophy with Iris Murdoch, and he also investigated less orthodox schools of thought. In the early 1970s he discovered the teachings of George Gurdjieff, who placed responsibility on the individual to live mindfully, and to develop one’s perceptions through a programme known simply as ‘The Work’. It was a popular movement, which attracted among others the film director Peter Brook. Jacklin left the Gurdjieff Society in 1985, yet much in his work can be traced back to his immersion in its ideas, and his study of sacred dances known as ‘the Movements’. In these group meditational exercises, dancers – often dressed in white – make angular motions to exemplify the repetition of mathematical forms in the universe. The idea of physically active meditation is not unique to Gurdjieff, it is also found in the whirling of Sufi dervishes, and some forms of yoga; the latter a practice still pursued by Jacklin, and one of many instances of ‘people involved in their passions’[18] he has documented, in his monotypes of a sunlit yoga studio (Puck Building, 2003). Jacklin describes the Movements as ‘very emotional, insistent’; as someone who practised them daily, he appreciated that beneath the physical experience and strict forms lay a deeper significance. An asymmetric nine-pointed star or ‘enneagram’ – Gurdjieff’s ‘universal glyph, a schematic diagram of perpetual motion’[19] – is drawn onto the floor in performance as the base for the Movements. It is not unlike the chart used to coordinate the rocking of a mezzotint plate. Jacklin was seeking his own language to describe the stillness at the heart of perpetual motion.

In 1980 Jacklin returned to Portrait of My Father (1963), based on drawings he had made of Harold Jacklin as he lay close to death in an asylum bed.[20] This reworking may have indicated a readiness to tackle difficult subject-matter; Jacklin’s artistic response to the poor health of his mother, the Woman in a Bed drawings, were made the same year.[21] In the new version, Man with a Bib (1980) he depicted the dying man’s head and the darkness into which it recedes using all the technical means he could muster. He employed ‘a cocktail’ of processes, ‘scratching, rocking and rubbing’: scoring the plate, using aquatint to create a tonal area, then bringing in the rocker to get a double depth of black.[22] The grave face, sinking beneath its striped napkin, is reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s heads, such as Study for Portrait II (After the Life Mask of William Blake).[23]

By this time Jacklin was working on occasional portrait commissions, and painting figures in domestic interiors. The documentation of his father’s decline was complemented by studies of a woman rising from a chair and walking away – both figures making an exit of sorts. Jacklin was considering how movement might be portrayed in non-time-based media. Sometimes he employed a diptych structure to depict the same subject a few moments apart, and sometimes these different perspectives were incorporated within a single canvas.[24] He pursued these investigations in print, too, making large monotypes such as the Woman in a Chair series (1984) at the Curwen Studio with Stanley Jones and John Hutchings.[25] The tension in the woman’s pose is conveyed by the awkward angles of her elbows and knees; her limbs, highlighted against her own shadow on the wall, recall the rigid geometry of the systems drawings. Jacklin refreshed and refined the image on the bed of the offset press, often climbing up onto the press to access the plate. This open-ended process was a contrast to the satisfying finality of the techniques he had used in Rocker and Anemones. He enjoyed creating monotypes, which appealed to his preference for a tactile engagement with the matrix: ‘As a draughtsman I like to be able to erase, whereas the whole process of erasing on a plate is laborious.’ Monotypes remain an important part of his output.

Jacklin was to exchange the pent-up energy of the single figure rising from its chair, with its implications of domestic discord, for the variety and freedom of the crowds in New York City, to which he moved in 1985. ‘The whole city is a location,’ he says. ‘I paint an energy mass. It gets figurised in various ways, but it’s actually a flowing, pulsating energy.’[26] Caught up in that flow, Jacklin resumed the ‘outdoor drawing’ he had begun as a student on the streets of east London. ‘Anonymity was an issue,’ he admits; ‘I developed a way of drawing so you wouldn’t notice.’ He started to use smaller sketchbooks, and charcoals and pastels were worked on in the studio later, sometimes with models being brought in from the street. He drew workers in the diners directly under his studio on West 14th St (Howley’s Bar and Grill, 1986) and on Washington Street (Washington Street, 1986). He also drew in Frank’s, the steakhouse in the nearby meat-market, and Florent where Roy Lichtenstein ate lunch with his studio assistants. At night he sketched crowds in the Great Hall of Grand Central Station and rough sleepers on the benches; at dawn he drew chain-gangs of prisoners in police stations. On some excursions Jacklin was accompanied by his friend Abe Frajndlich, a photographer whose hidden camera came in useful in the West 42nd Street peepshows. ‘I always thought of New York as an arena,’ he says. ‘The light shining down, my spotlight. You can create your own drama…’ The unselfconscious choreography behind New Yorkers’ ordinary actions allowed him to continue his studies of group movement. He also made frequent studies of professional dancers, responding to both their sensual and spiritual aspects – from the glistening flesh of peepshow girls (e.g. Dancer 42nd Street II, a 1989 charcoal drawing)[27] to the serenity of white-robed holy figures (Dervish Dancers, 63rd St, a 2013 pastel).

Many of the drawings Jacklin made in his first years in New York served as preparatory work for larger projects. In the hot, hazy summer of 1991 he spent four months commuting from Manhattan to Coney Island on the D train, and sketching by the shore. The linear appeal of the rickety iron bridges and dilapidated piers of the resort were not lost on him, but he chose to focus on the site’s most transient aspect: the beach visitors. He liked Coney Island ‘because it was a kind of no man’s land, a place where anything could happen’. In the Coney Island suite (1992) people dive into the waves, relax in bars and collapse in deckchairs; two old men are viewed from behind, sitting in conference on a trashcan. The swimmers in Bathers are portrayed as an irregular network of units, an asymmetric pattern of light and shade that flows out from the pier’s geometry. The rhythms in these etchings – and in his paintings of the subject – recall his systems works of two decades earlier, ‘the relationship between the rhythmic repetition of units that is at the basis of the natural order’.[28] Jacklin states that he has been concerned with ‘the same thing all the time. The silhouettes, the light on the surface, the relationship between bodies… That shift between (for want of a better word) figuration and abstraction, it can be a flip of a coin for me, in the best work that I do.’

Coney Island was the first edition Jacklin created with master printer Catherine Mosley in New York; although he has worked with other studios (the Coney Island monotypes, for example, were printed with Pat Branstead), he and Mosley continue to work together regularly. Mosley’s influence, as well as the fresh location, brought a new freedom to Jacklin’s graphic work. He recalls their early collaborations, saying, ‘As an artist she often saw the way I was trying to go and offered the printing techniques to get me there.’[29] Mosley introduced Jacklin to carborundum, a process that allows the artist to paint directly onto the plate, leaving a brush stroke. Jacklin liked the gestural nature of the technique, and the thickness of the surface holding the ink,[30] using it with exuberant effect to depict the skaters in Rink I and II (1995). Following his year as the British Council’s official Artist in Residence in Hong Kong in 1993, he completed another portfolio with Mosley. In Hong Kong, as in New York, Jacklin sought out what he calls the city’s ‘rituals’ – chess games, temple visits, the tide of pedestrians and vehicles. These are described in the Hong Kong suite, as well as in his paintings from the time. In 9 pm Kowloon from Hong Kong (1994), he drew the industrial craft in the harbour; then employed aquatint to represent the broken surface of the water, stopping out the waves to get varying degrees of shadow, allowing the medium on the brush to fluidly depict ripples. His continued concern for abstract pattern can be seen in these waves, and in his attention to fabric, such as the dress of the female figure with her back to the viewer in Chinese Chess, or the circular shapes on the clothes of supplicants in Temple I that echo the mass of flowers and fruits on the altar. He clearly took pleasure in the opportunity clothing gave him for invention: the dress of the glamorous figure poised in the doorway in Snake Shop Hong Kong is made by pressing textured fabric into the soft ground on the etching plate.

Jacklin’s first years in New York were marked by a crime wave that overtook the city for a decade from the mid-1980s. He revisited the theme of conflict – this time using civilian, rather than military, security forces to examine the breakdown of order. In the etching The Salute (1999) police officers standing in tidy ranks are differentiated only by the levels of light that fall on them; their arrangement clearly references the petals in the final print from the Anemones suite. Jacklin responded to the maelstrom of civil protest, notably the Tompkins Square Park riots of 1988 in which police charged a crowd of demonstrators. In the body of work that culminated in the paintings The Dance: Tompkins Square and The Battle: Tompkins Square (1990) he recorded the stand-off between Hare Krishna dancers, homeless people and the state (present in the form of mounted police, riot shields and the American flag). The looming figure of authority on horseback recurs as a shadowy presence in monotypes such as Mounted Policeman NYC (2001) or the ‘Great Lawn’ series (e.g. After the Event, Great Lawn, 2000). In the monoprint Mounted Police Central Park II (2003) Jacklin records the NYPD about to bust two figures for drug possession. Wanting to make a simple statement in black and white without the subtle tonality that usually distinguishes his graphic work, Jacklin reworked this image in his studio as a rare linocut (Encounter, Central Park, 2004).

Encounter comes from a period during which Jacklin was painting a series of light, leafy, mostly unpopulated avenues, such as Literature Walk (2001), and other park landscapes. The influence of Impressionism was apparent, not for the first time, especially in the Reflection series (2001), which shows figures resting by a tranquil lake.[31] Yet there is often a sense of threat, even in such pleasant settings. The euphemistic language of the police is alluded to in titles referring to an ‘incident’ or ‘event’. ‘For quite a while now I’ve felt more like a reporter of my time than someone who’s involved in artistic pursuits,’[32] Jacklin told Michael Peppiatt in 2011. In the Central Park series, there is a suggestion of smoke over the buildings, a ripple of alarm in the crowd. The silhouette figures and the architecture that broods over them inevitably recall the attacks of 11 September 2001, which destroyed the North and South Towers of Manhattan’s World Trade Center. But some of Jacklin’s images preceded that event, which so altered New Yorkers’ perspective on their city: the etching After the Event I (2000) was commissioned by the Print Club of New York in 2000. Following 9/11, Jacklin was unnerved by his prescient depiction of urban disaster. He continued to develop the subject of park scenes in works such as the four Sheep Meadow etchings, made a decade later,[33] and the Early One Morning monotypes (2001), which show a crowd gathering and then departing.

In 2003 Jacklin participated in the Artists International Print Project (AIPP), a collaboration between the Scuola Internazionale di Grafica and Paupers Press, which allows a painter to spend time in Venice working on monotypes. Jacklin did not go to Venice with any preconceived ideas, choosing, as he had done in Hong Kong, to respond directly to his surroundings. He drew the small bridge that could be seen through the window of the workshop, the dramatic nocturnal processions, and a motif familiar from his Central Park series – a nameless event scattering people and birds in the Piazza San Marco. In the Calle al Luce monotypes, the view down a narrow street to its vanishing point is blocked by a series of enigmatic figures. Jacklin ascribes the claustrophobic tone of these works to his memories of Don’t Look Now, Nicolas Roeg’s 1973 film set in Venice, which features haunting visual ambiguities and water motifs. The creation of ‘watery effects’ – in this case, the tidal waterways and the incessant rain – had intrigued Jacklin since his deft depictions of the sea at Coney Island. Michael Taylor of Paupers Press recalls that the artist favoured a mixture of turpentine and oil, which he called ‘spritz’, using it ‘to spray and splash onto the image almost at the end of the drawing process on the plate. This separated on the plate creating the spots of light that glimmer across each image.’[34] This technique is used to particular effect in Verso al Luce IV (2005) and Piazza al Notte I. Meanwhile, Paupers Press encouraged Jacklin to try out ‘the old William Blake method’: using the residue of the previous image, the ink left behind on the plate after printing, as the starting point for a new image. ‘This meant’, Taylor continues, ‘that there were sequences of images that appear to be the same, but are in fact completely new versions. This creates different textures, a broader tonal range and a sense of the history of the image making, almost like underpainting.’[35] It was a productive project, resulting in a number of haunting monotypes. Since then Jacklin has worked on other projects with Paupers, including the hand-coloured etching Towards Battersea Bridge (2006), a rare return to representing London, as well as the large etchings Grand Central Station and Gridlock.[36]

Since the turn of the millennium, the tension that characterised Jacklin’s early mezzotints has been increasingly replaced by the lighter touch of the monotypes, a form with which the artist has developed a particular affinity. Jacklin often uses monotypes to develop ideas while working on a painting; he will move backwards and forwards between the press and canvas, adjusting both compositions.[37] He works on zinc plates that once belonged to Robert Motherwell, given to him by Mosley, who editioned Motherwell’s prints from 1978 until his death in 1991. Jacklin feels that monotypes free him up, and perhaps offset the desire for control that was evident in the systems art. ‘Working in series often releases me to leave well alone once I have established a space, accepting the shifting and changing play of light and the brush strokes to depict a scene, […] accepting no single point of view as the only one.’ This acknowledgement of multiplicity and change is apparent in the series of elegiac and graceful monotypes entitled Into the Sea at Night, several of which were made after the painting of the same name was completed in 2010.

Jacklin’s willingness to embrace change is evident in the relocations he has made to challenge his artistic vision. A Manhattan resident for nearly two decades, after 9/11 Jacklin made plans to leave the city. In 2003 he moved with his wife (the fashion designer Janet Russo) and baby daughter to Newport, Rhode Island, taking a studio ‘in a beat-up fire station overlooking a street more like the Bowery of old than the gentrified area it is now’. He maintained a strong connection to New York, visiting often to draw: ‘I had to come and go to keep a freshness in my observations.’ His urban subject-matter, such as the stormy waters of New York Harbour (2003 onwards), or umbrellas observed on a rainy day in Times Square (2007), became less focused on the city’s architecture and its inhabitants than formerly, more on the mood created by the mercurial weather, although he remains fascinated by the mutable energy of crowds: watching a match in the sports stadium, celebrating Independence Day or circling on an ice rink. After twelve years in Rhode Island, the family moved again, settling in Connecticut to be closer to Manhattan. Jacklin works from two studios, one in New York with a view over the High Line (a major development since his arrival in the city) and another in Connecticut that looks out onto an abundant garden. ‘Is it true that anything can be changed, seen in any light?’ the composer John Cage (Jacklin’s near neighbour in 1980s Manhattan) once asked Rauschenberg. Jacklin answers the question in the affirmative: ‘I have this feeling there’s going to be a lot more changes. I’m always excited about what the next stage will be; if you keep your inner freedom then you have every possibility open to you. If you know what you’re going to do, you’ve locked yourself down. So I go back to the studio with an open mind.’

Notes

1. John Cage, ‘On Robert Rauschenberg, Artist, and His Work’ (1961), in John Cage, Silence: Lectures and Writings, London, 1999, p. 104.

2. Bill Jacklin’s statement to Penelope Marcus on Tate’s acquisition of Catena, later published in The Tate Gallery Report 1970–1972, London, 1972; extract available at http://www. tate.org.uk/art/artworks/jacklincatena- t01494/text-catalogue-entry (accessed 20 July 2014).

3. Margaret Priest, ‘A Stranger in New York: A Recollection, A Reawakening and A Revelation’, in Bill Jacklin. Recent Work/New York, exh. cat., Marlborough Gallery, New York, 2012.

4. This quotation and all following unattributed quotations come from an unpublished interview between Nancy Campbell and Bill Jacklin RA at the Royal Academy, London, 4 June 2015.

5. Blake, formerly Jacklin’s tutor at Walthamstow, had begun teaching at the RCA in 1964.

6. Rauschenberg had a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery, London in 1964, as did fellow American Jasper Johns. The work of both artists was a revelation to a generation of art students. See Robert Rauschenberg, Oral History Interview, 21 Dec. 1965, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, at http:// www.aaa.si.edu/collections/ interviews/oral-history-interviewrobert- rauschenberg-12870, accessed 14 July 2015. For more on Jasper Johns, see Michael Critchley, Jasper Johns, London and New York, 1977, and Riva Castleman, Jasper Johns, A Print Retrospective, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1986.

7. ‘Bill Jacklin’, in Michael Peppiatt, Interviews with Artists 1966–2012, New Haven and London, 2012, p. 258.

8. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, Paris, 1938, p. 121.

9. Tate Gallery Report, 1972.

10. John Russell Taylor, Bill Jacklin, London, 1997, p. 39.

11. Tate Gallery Report, 1972.

12. The prints were titled after the earlier drawings: Matter, Vibrato and Gleaners.

13. Tate Gallery Report, 1972.

14. The review appeared in The Sunday Times, see Taylor 1997, p. 32.

15. Taylor 1997, p. 32.

16. The five prints are Rocking Along the Line, Rocking and Rubbing, Moody Rocker, Rocking My Blues Away and Weeny Rocker.

17. Taylor 1997, p. 7.

18. Bill Jacklin, email to Nancy Campbell, 9 July 2015.

19. James Moore, Gurdjieff: The Anatomy of a Myth, Shaftesbury, 1991, p. 344, quoted in Peter B. Clarke, New Religions in Global Perspective: A Study of Religious Change in the Modern World, Abingdon, 2006, p. 101.

20. Harold Jacklin had been committed to an asylum in 1958.

21. Alice Jacklin died in 1986.

22. Bill Jacklin, email to Nancy Campbell, 9 July 2015.

23. See Dawn Ades and Andrew Forge, Francis Bacon, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London, 1985, no. 27 [1955, oil on canvas, 61 x 58 cm, Tate Gallery]. For other works by Bacon see David Sylvester, Francis Bacon: The Human Body, University of California Press/ Hayward Gallery, London, 1998.

24. For example, Double Buddha (1976–77), Taylor 1997, pp. 42–3. For Taylor’s close analysis of ‘doubling’ in Jacklin’s paintings see pp. 47 and 66 (on Double Buddha) and p. 107 and pp. 114–15 (Incident on 42nd St, 1988).

25. For more on the Curwen Studio see Stanley Jones, Stanley Jones and the Curwen Studio, London, 2010

26. Peppiatt 2012, p. 265.

27. These studies for dancers were preparatory drawings for the paintings 42nd Street and 42nd St Interior (both 1988).

28. Tate Gallery Report, 1972.

29. Bill Jacklin, email to Nancy Campbell, 7 July 2015.

30. Bill Jacklin, email to Nancy Campbell, 9 July 2015.

31. See, for example, Georges Seurat, Bathers at Asnières (1884) or A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884).

32. Peppiatt 2012, p. 260.

33. Printed with Simon Lawson in London during 2013 and 2014.

34. Michael Taylor, email to Nancy Campbell, 22 July 2015.

35. Michael Taylor 2015.

36. Bill Jacklin, email to Nancy Campbell, 9 July 2015.

37. For a discussion of Bill Jacklin’s reasons for painting in series (his ‘zigzag course towards finality’), see Taylor 1997, p. 121 and pp. 222–32.

From Bill Jacklin Graphics, Royal Academy of Arts, 2015