John McEwen

Haunting melancholy

As a former winner of Britain’s most prestigious award for painters, the John Moores prize (other winners include Hamilton, Hilton, Hockney, Hoyland), a new show by Andrzej Jackowski should not be missed, especially not these notably small but powerful paintings in his latest exhibition at Purdy Hicks.

The phrase ‘depth charge’ is used in the catalogue to describe their effect, in the sense that their force is densely contained and profound. It is certainly what Jackowski aspires to achieve. In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Painting at Brighton University in 2003, he said, ‘Seamus Heaney talks about poems and individual words as “depth charges” and the skill of making a poem, as being able to drop a bucket down the well of ourselves, in his phrase “a way to open the skin of the pool of ourselves”. I wanted in my work to drop that bucket farther down the well.’

An abnormal upbringing helps an artist to enrich this well of individuality and Jackowski benefits from a very odd upbringing indeed. Born in 1947, the first seven years of his life were spent in a refugee camp for ‘alien’ Poles in Cheshire. Winters were harsher then and the wooden huts could be cold, partitions sometimes formed with no more than a blanket.

The camp was his life until at the age of seven he entered the local English school. Up to that age he had lived in a microcosm of Poland, speaking only Polish. His father, an army officer who had won his country’s equivalent of the VC, was the camp administrator; and the family did not leave until he was 11. His father subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown and separated from his mother.

Today Jackowski lives on a hill in sunny Brighton, but those childhood years still dominate his imagination.

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