BILL JACKLIN

Bill Jacklin still remembers the first time he looked out of a plane window and saw the ocean from 38,000 feet. He was a young man travelling to New York, caught up in the excitement of this new experience. He had seen the sea before, but not like this, from above, with no horizon to contain the limitless expanse of turquoise blue extending outwards. From this height, the water surface was lost to sight, with even the most mountainous seas flattened into a graduating pattern of light and dark. This shifting, glinting variegation soon found its way into Jacklin’s work. In the early 1970s, he began to make prints and drawings that captured light flowing across the paper surface in rolling patterns. Although referred to as ‘System’ works, with the attendant mechanical implications, they hint at unseen natural forces. In some, a swarm of finely drawn black lines twists itself into a graphic murmuration, like iron filings mesmerised by a magnet, while in others, graduating waves of darkness curl across a white ground in systematic repetition, carving out columns of light that dissolve into pools of rich mezzotint black.

When he landed in New York and walked along the unfamiliar sidewalks of Manhattan, Jacklin found himself lost in a sea of humanity that appeared to be moving in one direction. If he stopped, they flowed past him, an unstoppable wave of people driven by unseen forces. In Central Park and the Rockefeller Centre, Jacklin watched skaters reduced to luminous shadows as they glided across the ice, spotlit in the cold winter light, their laughter and conversations swept away on the breeze. In Grand Central Station, he looked down, fascinated at the surge of commuters caught in the compelling rush, reduced to anonymous blobs of colour that followed a lemming path towards the light, their snaking queues unfurling across the ground in probing mycelial pathways.

Wherever he is, and whatever he is doing, Jacklin is the perpetual observer, Baudlaire’s flâneur, watching life unfold around him as he walks the streets or stands beside the ocean. Something will catch his eye, and he will mentally capture it, or if he has his sketchbook, quickly draw it, noticing the movement, the shapes, the fall of light, the tonal interplay. He reduces the individual and individual narratives to a fluid vocabulary of marks that capture a metaphysical essence, where shadows suggest the passage of time, shapes delineate movement, and hard-edged physical forms dissipate into a luminous atomic blizzard. Even when individuals occasionally resolve into focus: playing a game of chess, dancing in the park or gossiping by a bench on the boardwalk, these moments frozen in time are not concerned with a specific narrative or person, but with the essence they evoke: a particular quality of stillness and concentration or a specific dynamic energy. They are a symbolic reminder of something else, a cipher for a quality or emotion Jacklin wants to capture, a visual metanarrative often teasing memories of other paintings: his contemporary urban characters becoming the crowds at the foot of a Renaissance cross, a secular deposition, a ‘hunt in the forest.’  But despite the close-up details of these occasional microcosms of familiarity, Jacklin stands most comfortably on the edge, looking from a distance, forever the passenger on the plane staring at the sea far below.

From 38,000 feet, a ship is a dot on the ocean. From 140 million miles, the planet Mars is a mere pinprick of red light in the night sky. Glimpsed from the edge of a canal in Venice, tourists hurrying across a distant bridge are fleeting specks of anonymous colour. As a student at the Royal College of Art, Jacklin became fascinated by the idea of molecular complexity. He wanted his work to explore these metaphysical realities, representing the flux and flow of the invisible natural forces that govern and shape everything, from the movement of the planets to the tides, the seasons, the weather, and the rhythmic pulse of day and night. At a molecular level, the distinction between nature and human, organic and mechanical blurs into an overarching unity, but when we see things from a distance these distinctions also blur. As Jacklin stands on the edge of the ocean at night, watching the waves rolling in, seeing the wind cast a blizzard of spume into the air to melt into the stars, he is also standing in a snowstorm in New York watching hurrying couples fade into light, evaporating like a pyrotechnic explosion of blossom drifting in the breeze like clouds across the sky.

Jacklin has constantly explored the structure of light in his work, seeking to endow its ephemeral substance with physical presence. He wants to give the intangible a space to be felt, momentarily pausing the inexorable flow of nature’s entropy so that we can glimpse the unseen passage of the miraculous. He does so by standing and watching at the world’s liminal edges: when day fades into night or re-emerges at dawn, when liquid and solid wrestle for control at the boundary between land and sea, when the individual becomes lost in or stands out from the crowd, or at those times of day when shadow and solid blur into in-distinction and form a unified whole. Like a nocturne, his works may capture movement, but they also slow down time, forcing us to concentrate on the passage of tiny marks and the inter-action of often elusive colours rather than asking us to speculate on the meaning of hidden narratives.

Yet Jacklin’s work is not just about light and the embodiment of dissolution. Wherever he has lived, whether by the Sea or in the city, he observes the dynamic patterns around him, whether studying the movement of clouds, the surge of commuters rushing for a train or skaters dancing across the ice. These abstract patterns of dynamic inter-relationship form an organic grid that underpins his compositions, providing him with a common visual lexicon, whose underlying shapes unite natural and human forces. Sea and City are no longer separate spaces but merge into a universal whole of mysterious, tantalising interconnectedness.

–Richard Davey, 2025

From the catalogue for Bill Jacklin’s exhibition “City to Sea” at the Portland Gallery, London