Emily Jackson (1909-1993)

Michael Jackson

Emily Jackson was born in Levin, and lived most of her life in Inglewood and Auckland. Her mother's brother, Walter Tempest, exhibited with the Royal Academy. His watercolours hung in the house where she was raised. From an early age she was spellbound by these images of Yorkshire moorland, hills in mist, industrial towns obscured by smog. At Stratford High School, Emily and Toss Woollaston were contemporaries. Woollaston often came to Inglewood to visit the Crossman family - close friends of Emily's parents. Emily saw some of "Wooly's" paintings and was impressed.  Seeing his mature work at an exhibition in Auckland many years later, Emily was overwhelmed.  When the two painters renewed their friendship, Emily showed Woollaston photos of some of her work.  Emily's modest comment was that Woollaston "liked them." Her unassuming attitude to her own work, and her outspoken enthusiasm for Woollaston and McCahon, have often given the impression that she always painted under their influence, and derived her inspiration from them. 

But in an essay she wrote in 1986 about her life as a painter, Emily observed:

I haven't tried to imitate the painting [of Woollaston], although I have heard one or two people say that I "copy Woollaston."  This is so untrue that I have been utterly taken aback, momentarily only however. I have been under a spell, but lately have broken out of it enough to feel that I am at last doing my own thing and have perhaps created a style of my own, crude and rough and uneven as it may be.

Emily's relationship with McCahon was equally crucial to her development as a painter.  She took classes with McCahon for a while, and he visited her studio on several occasions to appraise her work.  McCahon's criticisms were forthright and useful.   "You'll have to be a whole lot tougher," he told her, and she was. With every new series of paintings, her mood vacillated between elation and despair. Sell-effacing, hard-working, and always skeptical of praise, she would return time and time again to the wild and marginal landscapes of New Zealand - the Desert Road, the King Country, Central Otago, Waioeka Gorge, Coromandel, Karekare, Whatipu - as a measure of what was real and as a source of inspiration,  Her aim was always abstraction, not representation.  But it was an abstraction attained by reaching deeper and deeper into the landscape through direct experience and intuition.  She was never much interested in the abstraction of ideas, or in following fashions and movements in the art world, unless these illuminated the landscapes that compelled her to paint.  Her expressionism, her energy, the rawness of her palette, her virtuoso use of acrylic, all testify to this passionate and compassionate engagement with land, sea, river, and sky.

 For twenty years - from. 1937, when she was 28, to 1957 - Emily's time and energy was almost completely taken up with, raising her family in Nelson and in Inglewood, Taranaki, where her husband D'Arcy Jackson worked in the Bank of New South Wales. They had five children.   However, in the early fifties, Emily attended art classes organised for parents by the local PTA. Art specialist, Don Campbell, encouraged his students to paint to music, in weekends, and whenever she could find time, Emily went out into the countryside with a friend and painted her first landscapes.  When she and her family moved to Auckland in 1957, she joined the Auckland Society of Arts, and worked on paintings at home while her children were at school.  Arthur Hipwell gave weekly criticism classes.

 My week revolved around this routine and I loved it absolutely.  I sat in the bus, looking with new eyes at everything 1 passed, seeing shadows and lights, angles and lines, shapes and forms.  The enjoyment was endless. Arthur used to say, "You are there, not to paint a picture, but to create a scene''.  He said that painting was 99% seeing ( I add feeling), and 1% technique.  He was critical of Art Schools with their rigid rules - he told us to watch young people like Don Binney and Pauline Thompson who he thought had great talent.

 In 1966, Emily became a Working Member of the A.S.A. In 1968, she was awarded the Bledisloe Medal for Landscape Painting.  At this time her aim was "to paint two good paintings every year and eventually be able to fill the walls of our house with something better than pages cut from magazines and books and calendars," Twenty years later, her house was filled with her canvases - so too was her garage and garden studio.  And at least three hundred of her works hung in private collections throughout New Zealand, as well, as in Australia and the USA.   A "Waioeka Gorge" hangs in the New Zealand High Commission in Kuala Lumpur.   From the tune of her first exhibition, organised at the urging of Colin McCahon, at Moller's Gallery, Auckland, in 1972, to the time of her death in September 1993, Emily exhibited new work every year, except one.  Her output was prolific, her style always changing, her self-criticism unrelenting.

 In September 1987, Emily had a solo exhibition of "Desert Road" paintings at Gallery Pacific. Only four months before, she had written of "months of despair," struggling through the pain of rheumatoid arthritis, intense doubts about the quality of her work, and a failure of inspiration.  Yet, she observed:

 I have always maintained that inspiration is unnecessary, that hard work is the thing that matters, but I’ve suddenly got the magic feeling again of being quite absorbed, in what I'm doing. The magic of the Desert Road, is back, even more so than it was years ago when I first saw it.  Perhaps no one will like these paintings - it's more than likely - but they are what I must do, even though I tell myself, as always, that this wonderful feeling cannot last and I will crash to a low again.

 Emily was possibly her own worst publicist.   Praising the work of others, she often disparaged her own.  "I have never really made it as a good painter, and never will,” she wrote in February 1989, "but the journey has been so absorbing and wonderful, and the few glimpses of good painting enough to make it an immense thing in my life."  Now that Emily's journey is done, it is perhaps time to take the matter of judgement out of her hands, and look at her work again, not in the shadow of those other painters with whom she is so often compared, but in the light of the landscapes she entered into - compulsively, passionately, remorselessly exploring the human condition, on her own terms, in. her own way, in her own good time.