Ashley's lifelong affair with Mother Nature

'I go mad every time a painting is complete. I have never been satisfied with any of my work..."

This is part of one of Ashley Jackson's occasional verses written in 1967 which can be found on page 132 of Ashley's Jackson's Yorkshire Moors: A Love Affair (Dalesman, £19.99). Next to it, on the right hand page, is a reproduction of a blisteringly beautiful watercolour, White Plains - Boshaw.

The painting was done, after some difficulty, and presented to his daughter Heather for a wedding gift. It could equally be called Fanfare in White and Blue, for the steeped sky and the snow-covered moor -- punctured by a leaning telegraph pole and the spine of a buried dry-stone wall curving to distant stone houses -- chime against each other.

Looking through the 142 pages of this treasure of a book - each reproduction is like looking at a landscape through a remote cottage window - it is easy to understand the painter's anguish.

The spell cast by a memorable landscape is a song that comes out of nowhere to haunt you: both correspond to a complex pattern of moods and feelings; the artist's job is to be receptive to this interplay between the outer and the inner.

But what happens when the moment has passed, the painting is finished, the song has been sung? Anguish, despair, the longing for the moment to return. That's why Ashley Jackson is a compulsive painter of the Yorkshire Moors; and why most of the 69 paintings in the book echo like the phrase of a song in the soul.

"What happens is that you're getting love letters from Mother Nature. The wind, the rain, the mist, the skylark: all I am doing is translating those love letters into painting," he said.

We were in one of the exhibition rooms off the lobby of The Royal Armouries in Leeds, where the paintings reproduced in the book are even more impressive in their original double-elephant size. For the gala opening, the artist had changed into a black dinner suit with a green bow tie. I told him he looked like a band leader. He laughed and referring to his ceremonial get-up, said something I can't repeat.

Heather, his daughter and business manager, was there, looking fetching in pink. Anne Jackson, Ashley's wife for 38 years, was not apparent. She believed in him right from the very start - unlike 'The Establishment'. That phrase came up more than once. I asked him what he meant by it.

"I started off in Barnsley," he said. "The principal of the art college did everything he could to stop me when I said I wanted to be an artist.

"Students used to spit on my work. I went to see him about it and he said I shouldn't mind because they were only expressing an opinion.

"My wife has been behind me. I lived on her earnings for seven years and carried on. The Establishment would say, 'Oh you're just a wishy-washy water-colourist!' So it was an uphill battle with them.

"But for the man in the street I am a modern artist; my work is contemporary, but the term has been hi-jacked by The Establishment and means a pile of bricks." (Carl Andre's pile of bricks in London's Tate Gallery).

So how does he feel about David Hockney?

"Hockney and I get on fine. He's a different religion to me," he said, using 'religion' as a metaphor for their different artistic concerns.

"The thing we have in common is soul. I have always been a spiritual man. I believe in God, but I don't believe in religion. You have to have soul to paint paintings."

He distinguishes between paintings and pictures, but I won't go into that here. Although art has made him wealthy, he still thinks of himself as an artisan (he learned painting technique as a sign-writer, painting on glass).

"Every Thursday I go to my studio and do 70 monochrome paintings of light and shade. I put the music on and I'm at it from ten in the morning until ten at night. Then I tear them all up! The paper is £3 a sheet.

"When someone buys a painting in my gallery (at Holmfirth) for £1,000 or £3,000, they are paying for me to tear up paper!

"When I paint on the moors I don't think about money. I don't know what wage I get a week or what I earn in a year. My wife and accountant have kept me that way for 38 years," he said.

Ashley Jackson, rich and famous, has got his patter down to a fine art. His paintings, however, speak for themselves. The landscapes, void of people, glorify the harmony of solitude. But the land is thrown into relief by great dark elemental skies and redeeming shafts of light.

"One can be lonely sitting among a hundred other people at the hub of a bustling city where no one is aware of your existence. That to me is loneliness," he says in his book.

"But to stand alone on the moors, with my paints and paper, surrounded by the beauty of nature, that is solitude - and there is a huge difference...

"I would not be afraid to die in such a way. Indeed, I can think of no better way to leave this earth than to succumb to the elements that I have striven so long to depict."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.