Jacklin approaches his adopted home like an investigative journalist - restless to absorb its rituals and
Jacklin approaches his adopted home like an investigative journalist - restless to absorb its rituals and peculiarities, and, inevitably, its underside: the peepshows off Times Square and the hookers of 42nd Street; the restless movement of the homeless on the benches at Grand Central Station; the swinging carcasses unloaded by 14th Street meat packers; all the lunatic parade of insanity that in New York passes for everyday life. Jacklin's friend, the archivistJohn Kobal, summed it up: "He likes open spaces in which anything can happen, where everyone mixes. Men who might be murderers bask in the sun beside secretaries on lunch-breaks with their transistors."Asked why the city still appeals, Jacklin replies as he must once have told Kobal: "You are in a space where anything can happen It's a contradictory arena. I didn't leave to become a New Yorker, but I stay because it still excites me."It is odd to hear his accent - defiantly English - and to recognise his unmistakable charm and self-effacing modesty, at odds with the flashiness of the Manhattan art world. "I try to respond to their generosity of spirit," he says of the art-hungry New Yorkers. "I like that kind of openness."Like Klein with his camera, Jacklin has poked into corners that New Yorkers see but rarely register. Only a visitor's inquisitive eye could also pick up on the quirky humour: the poodles, owners and stewards at the annual dog show at Madison Square Gardens are richly depicted. So, too, the palmist at work on Coney island, and the mother dragging her child along the subway.The rock star Sting has also long admired the artist and his work: "Bill Jacklin is, like me, an Englishman in New York," he says "He sees it with the wonder and objectivity of an outsider.
He can appreciate its miracles, and can transfer them to canvas better than anyone I know." Sting is responsible for one of Jacklin's once-infrequent excursions from the city and nurtured a memorable series of paintings. Jacklin accompanied the singer to Philadelphia on the first leg of an American tour, with the intention of painting him. The portrait did not materialise, but the series of pictures that did, Audience I-III, are among Jacklin's finest. As in so much of his work (such as the bathers at Coney Island and the commuters on the concourse of Grand Central Station), the artist thrills to the sheer movement of the crowd.
"I enjoy being anonymous," he declares, and, though he appears to be as much a participator on the streets as an entranced recorder of its anarchy, he becomes, he says, "invisible".Jacklin's monumental urban landscapes - some are composites of up to four separate canvasses - opened last week in New York and are on show soon at Marlborough Fine Art in London. One spectacular piece, The Rink, a mural in nine panels and 24 feet in length, was commissioned for the new terminal at Washington Airport. And a magnificent monograph of his work, with an illuminating biographical text by John Russell Taylor, was published last week.Jacklin has been labelled as a loner both artistically and socially, though no one has a bad word to say of him, and his admirers are fervent. The quote from Sting for this piece came through within an hour of the request. But his easy-going manner conceals a background of hardship and considerable sadness.
An early memory is of his father, a gifted amateur artist, burning his own paintings in the garden, weeping as he did so. He was later hostile to Jacklin's ambition to take up art.Jacklin worked as a labourer to pay his way through college - he entered Walthamstow Art School, near his home in London's East End, in 1960, but left after two years to design railway posters for an advertising agency. In 1965, he was admitted to the Royal College of Art, where his tutors included Peter Blake and Carel Weight. After graduating, he assisted Yoko Ono, helping her put on a show of "half objects" at the Lisson Gallery in 1967.Now 54, he has always been "unfashionable", in the best sense "I paint what I know," he once declared. As Pop Art took off in Britain, Jacklin stayed resolutely a "systems artist" - a painter of abstracts - exploring geometric patterns and lines and networks of points and dots. Having achieved success in this minimalist style, he changed course during the 1970s to follow a more realistic inclination.