Holme Valley artist Ashley Jackson was born in a far-flung tropical corner of the British Empire, but his art was forged by the dramatic moorlands of Yorkshire.
The soon-to-be 75-year-old has made his name as a painter of passionate, dramatic and atmospheric landscapes, capturing the wild and hardy beauty of the region. A brooding colour palette and extreme weather conditions are the hallmarks of his work, so much so that the title of a forthcoming exhibition to mark his milestone birthday is ‘Passing Storms and Spiritual Skies’.
These days Ashley is feted as one of the country’s most important landscape artists and an ambassador for Yorkshire, but it wasn’t always so.
Like his mentor and friend, the late, great, Lancashire artist LS Lowry, Ashley spent his early years facing rejection from the art establishment, facing critics that he describes as ‘pseudo-intellectuals’. When he began painting six decades ago his figurative landscapes didn’t fit into the evolving post-war abstract, conceptual and pop art scene. But self-belief, determination and the unwavering backing of his wife, Anne, spurred him on.
As Ashley says: “I belong to a group of artists and sculptors who don’t have to write ‘this way up’ on the back of their works. My paintings don’t have to have pieces of paper pinned next to them to explain what they’re about. I’ve been successful because of the power of the people. Ordinary people who have bought my work and encouraged me.”
The demise of skill in art is a theme that Ashley has often spoken about publicly. When I first met the artist 30 years ago or so, it was one of the topics we discussed then. And he’s still irritated that much contemporary ‘art’ continues to move further and further away from the definition of the word. “Art comes from the word ‘artisan’,” says Ashley, “and artisans are skilled. Conceptual art is about making a statement, not art.” Piles of bricks, he says, referring to the controversial Tate-owned Carl Andre work of the 1970s that comprised 120 firebricks, can be arranged by anyone.
In contrast, Ashley points out that his landscapes are the result of years of honing his skills with a paintbrush, not to mention hours spent traipsing across open moorlands and ‘plein air’ painting. He’s never been afraid of hard work.
“I tear up more work than I frame,” he says. And woe betide anyone who wants to buy his art because it suits their interior decor. “Paintings should speak to you,” he says.
While Ashley’s name and work is now synonymous with Yorkshire and he’s often described as ‘Barnsley-born’, he was, in fact, born in Penang, Malaysia, where his parents lived a colonial lifestyle.
His young life was blighted by tragedy — his father died in Borneo at the hands of the
Japanese — and after his mother remarried Ashley was brought to Britain. He arrived in Yorkshire as a 10-year-old, living for a time in Linthwaite, where his stepfather had family. The culture and climate shock was great but Ashley says that being in the Colne Valley awakened something in his artistic soul.
He explains: “We used to play cricket in a little quarry that looked down over the Colne Valley. The trains in the valley bottom looked like toy trains and I used to get that ‘wow’ feeling. We’d go up on to the moor and The Heights and the views were amazing. That spirit is still with me.”
His formative years, however, were spent in Barnsley, where he went to art school and found work as a signwriter.
The rise from struggling artist to successful Yorkshire ‘brand’ took years, but Ashley had a fierce determination that his daughter, Claudia, who now runs his gallery in Holmfirth, says was born of the difficulties he endured as a child and youth. Ashley had a problematic relationship with his stepfather, who was not averse to using his fist to make a point, and the teenager (already interested in art) didn’t fit in too well at the tough secondary modern school in Barnsley that attempted to educate him.
Subsequent snubs by the art establishment, after he gave up his job to become a full-time painter, must have seemed like just another
hurdle. “It’s been an uphill battle for 60 years,” he says, “not with the public but the with the pseudo-intellectuals who control the art world. They will only have their type of art in the galleries.”
But Ashley is made of stern stuff and admits that he was always good at finding ways to promote his work.
He began by getting the Yorkshire press on his side, including The Examiner. His exhibitions started to attract media attention, although breaking into the London art scene proved to be extraordinarily difficult. He never shied away from making connections with the movers and shakers. Over the years he has mixed with royalty, politicians and celebrities.
His biography, An Artist’s Life by Chris Bond, is peppered with famous names. During the 1990s he featured in a popular Yorkshire Television series, A Brush with Ashley, which brought him even further into the limelight.
Although he enjoys a certain celebrity status, Ashley has kept his feet firmly on the ground — teaching an adult education class in
Holmfirth for 30 years and working with convicts in Wakefield Prison, a role that he found enormously rewarding.
However, not many living artists can claim to have had one of the country’s best-known painters as his mentor. Ashley met LS Lowry when the ‘matchstick men’ artist arrived one day to view an exhibition of his landscapes in The George Hotel in Huddersfield. They struck up a friendship that endured until Lowry’s death. “His work had also been rejected by the art establishment,” says Ashley, “but then he’d say ‘look at me now’. He was offered honours but always refused them. I used to take my portfolio to him before an exhibition and ask his opinion.”
Now facing his 75th birthday in October, Ashley is still painting and enjoying the Yorkshire landscape that he calls his ‘mistress’. As he says: “I am lucky to be able to read mother nature’s love letters and transform them into paintings. I go up on the moors and talk to mother nature up there — I only paint when I get that wow feeling.”
His work, which once sold for a few shillings, now commands up to £35,000 for a large watercolour (in his gallery), and Ashley is clearly proud of the body of work he is about to show. “Has my work improved?” he responds when asked the question. “Yes it has, I would buy back some of my early work if I could.”
But he is a happy man, with his family around him — daughters Claudia and Heather and his four grandchildren all live locally — and his beloved moors within easy reach. “I will never retire,” he says, “I‘ll die with a paint brush in my hand.”
- Passing Storms and Spiritual Skies is on
from September 1 to 12 at Ashley’s gallery in Holmfirth.
