BILL JACKLIN

When Richard Attenborough turned Joan Greenwood’s anti-war musical, ‘Oh What a Lovely War’ into a film, he shot many of the scenes on the West Pier at Brighton. The pier became a metaphor for the world, with its grand ballroom serving as a fantasy headquarters for the various Heads of State and Military leaders to plot and plan the strategy of the war. By confining the drama to this pleasure palace more usually associated with seaside holidays, fun and entertainment, Attenborough reduced the unimaginable horrors of the First World War into a seaside attraction, a piece of theatre where the grim statistics of deaths and casualties were put up on a scoreboard, as if they were the results of a friendly game of cricket rather than a global conflict.

Greenwood’s musical premiered on stage to critical acclaim in 1963, the same year that the twenty year old Bill Jacklin started work on his own anti-war satire, the mechanical sculpture, Invitation Card (page 10–11). Resembling an end of pier automaton, there is an obvious theatricality to these progressively disintegrating, relentlessly saluting soldiers, made with materials Jacklin bought from a local Walthamstow hardware store. Balancing the sophisticated with the handmade, this powerful and moving sculpture was inspired by Jacklin’s troubled relationship with his father, a highly decorated First World War veteran who suffered ‘shell shock’ as a result of his harrowing experiences on the Western Front. Making it gave Jacklin the space to look back at his father’s past at a time when he was very directly confronting his present, visiting him in a mental hospital where he was being treated for the ongoing effects of what we now know to be PTSD. Jacklin’s immediate and natural response to the situation was to make intimate drawings of his father lying in bed, his head slowly slipping down the pillow into an oblivion of white sheets.

This modest yet monumental sculpture begins with a very personal portrait of a man falling apart under the brutality of war, but it quickly moves out from the particular to become a wider critique of the First World War. As their clockwork innards are gradually revealed, these saluting figures movingly express the way ordinary soldiers were treated as machines to feed the voracious appetite of the enemy’s machine guns. And when the wooden box is closed and we can no longer see them, the performance continues, with a large, hand-stitched purple satin heart bursting out of the work’s wooden chest, inviting us to reflect further, moving from the dead and wounded of the Trenches, to the dead and wounded American combatants awarded the purple heart during the Vietnam and other wars, and from there to the wider consideration of the human cost of all armed conflict.

Invitation Card was a unique work, made to deal with a very specific subject. His degree show may have included some Rauschenberg inspired sculptural installations that combined paintings with objects, but Jacklin is a draughtsman not a sculptor. Every day for more than sixty years he has made ‘drawings’ to centre and ground him in space. He draws with paint, pencil, pen and ink, and with a variety of print making tools. During the two years he spent working on Invitation Card, Jacklin continued to make drawings. He tenderly traced the tired, sagging features of his father in hospital, drew anemones and fields of cabbages and self portraits in his student flat. He made a silk screen of a red fire bucket and transformed the six soldiers of Invitation Card into flattened, graphic versions of their three-dimensional selves, anonymous figures with gas masks and punctured by ‘bullet holes.’

By the end of the 1960s, however, Jacklin’s focus on the visible and tangible form of things began to change. Influenced by the philosophy lectures he attended at the Royal College of Art and his own developing art practise, Jacklin started to question the validity and relevance of representational art. It became a lie he no longer wanted to tell. Instead of setting out to capture a recognisable outline or capture an uncanny likeness of what he could see, Jacklin sought to make marks that were an equivalence for invisible metaphysical realities. He wanted to draw ‘molecular complexity’ and ‘manifest the image of something real’ beyond sight. His subject matter was still the living world and things he had observed, but as he sought to capture processes of change they were now ephemeral things, sensed rather than seen: the shift between light and dark, the relationship between shadow and solid, the inevitable progress of time. To capture these intangible sensations and meta-physical realities, Jacklin created graphic systems that paralleled the ‘living world’, employing the rigor of the grid and using units of symmetry and asymmetry to highlight change, represent the movement of light and question the hard boundary between the tangible and intangible. Jacklin used tricks of perception to echo a changing world, forming grids to hold highlights and shadows, and showing the flow of light into insubstantial darkness. These moments of transition are usually too nebulous for us to observe in reality. Day passes into night without us realising; dense mists dissipate into daylight before our eyes, but held in the structures and patterns of Jacklin’s graphic systems they took on form and became visible. Sometimes they were revealed through rigid grids and repeating patterns, sometimes they emerged more dynamically, as tiny radiating lines swirling in murmurations of shifting light across the surface of the paper, allowing clouds of matter to form and dissipate, and black holes to develop and draw the viewer into their luminous oblivion.

Jacklin had placed clock faces beneath the uniforms and behind the tin mask heads of the Invitation Card soldiers, reminders of the inevitable passage of time and that final countdown, measured by an officer’s watch, which led to a whistle being blown for men to go over the top. Yet, time told by clocks is a mental, artificial construct, a rigid, symmetrical delineation that has no grounding in the living world of natural forces, whereas the passage of time described in these abstract drawings is not defined by the even, rhythmical ticking of a clock but by the repetitive movement of Jacklin’s hand across the surface of a sheet of paper. These drawings measure and record the meditative inhalation and exhalation of his breath, sometimes long, sometimes short, sometimes deep, sometimes shallow. They show duration revealed by the passage of light and the lengthening of shadows. They record the process of growth and decay and the time taken to weave lines into complex interlocking patterns, one mark on top of another, one drawn breath following another, their palimpsestic patterns revealing in an instant the time they took to draw.

Then, one day Jacklin walked past a vase of anemones caught in a beam of sunlight and was struck by their beauty. He had to draw them. He placed them on a table in similar raking light and over the course of time captured their slow dissolution and decay, as the petals dropped and fell, tumbling into an accidental grid of fleeting forms, their natural beauty distilled into an abstract essence. Gradually the visible world began to reappear in Jacklin’s work. At the time, some couldn’t understand this shift from abstraction back to figuration. But Jacklin had become frustrated with the visual systems he was being identified with. He may have been called a ‘systems painter’, but he didn’t use systems for their own sake, he had always employed them to explore the metaphysical world around him, basing them on things he had seen, rather than focusing on formal processes that were artificially devised and deliberately disconnected from reality.

The dichotomy between abstraction and figuration only occurs when the physical and metaphysical worlds are separated. What Jacklin’s works reveal and explore is the continuum of coalescence that brings these two worlds together, the flow from the micro to the macro and back again. Sometimes he shows us the world in its solid state: as a visible object that can cast shadows and be bathed in light, grow, decay and be considered beautiful. Sometimes he shows us its more gaseous, atomic form as clouds of molecular marks drifting across a surface. But the majority of Jacklin’s work can be found occupying the space between these two states, as familiar forms dissolve within an atmospheric cloud of light and shadow. Skaters trace abstract dust clouds across the ice like anemone petals falling onto the table. Flurries of snow dissolve the solid world into an insubstantial cloud of light where edges blur and space collapses. Tree trunks melt into their lengthening shadows to form a lattice of intricate lace, while fields of poppies and wheat flow into an ecstatic wave of colour that dissolves into an ocean of light and space. These same processes of order breaking down into chaos are no different to the processes Jacklin initiated when shooting a rifle at the six soldiers or dissolving their uniforms in acid. These are not acts of destruction but means of expansion and enlightenment, as brushstrokes release the solid world, with its boundaries and defined forms, into a metaphysical reality, revealing the atomic whole of which everything is a tiny part. Along this continuum the intangible qualities of the sublime dissolve into the tangible forms of beauty, as we find ourselves lost in a deluge of colour seeking figures that tease with familiarity before evaporating into incandescent light.

A continuum implies linearity, but Jacklin’s work defies the linear progression of modernism. He constantly circles back to ideas and images, reworking and resurrecting them, reordering and rediscovering them. Rather than looking for the new and turning his back on the past, he pirouettes around familiar forms in a process of reflection and enlightenment, growth and regrowth. The figurative became abstract, the abstract became figurative and now his work is neither abstract nor figurative, but a field of poppies leading us in their murmuration flight towards immaterial light. In these fields of ecstatic colour we discern the expanded sense of reality he has always been seeking; as he draws a line and makes marks that he hopes will reach out to ‘both the physical and metaphysical world.’

– Dr. Richard Davey (2023)