Jack Knox RSA 1936-2015

Jack Knox. What a marvellous name that is: clear, resonant, to the point - like a Jack Knox painting. Few modern artists have taken greater pleasure in the purely visual than he: a basket of bread, a glass of wine, a bowl of oysters – beautiful things would entrance him. He looked, he contemplated, and then – quite quickly – made permanent the essence of what he had seen. In doing this Jack painted some of the most delightful Scottish paintings of the twentieth century.

Jack made the ordinary extraordinary, and he is a much more original artist than his often traditional subject-matter, his quiet realism, might suggest. No genuine artist needs to bend over backwards to be original, and Jack Knox remained true to his inimitable Glaswegian self.

‘Monet is only an eye – but, my God, what an eye!’, said Cezanne. Jack Knox was more than an eye, but ‘my God, what an eye!’ Clarity of form, shallow space and saturated colours were his hallmark. His paintings tend to be medium sized or small. His touch was deft, his exhibitions full of surprises. Jack Knox had something of the Archie Gemmell about him.

Born in Kirkintilloch, he studied Painting at Glasgow School of Art; Alasdair Gray, Ian McCulloch, Archie McIntosh and Ewan McAslan were his close friends. A postgraduate scholarship then took him to Paris, where he boldly attached himself to the Atelier of Andre Lhote (a late Cubist who had worked closely Picasso and Braque [sic]).

When he returned – Glaswegian bravura, European Modernism and a naturally idiosyncratic personality (at once innocent, intellectual and humorous) conjoined to create a truly distinctive artist.

I remember how thrilled Jack was to hear Hamish Henderson quote from a Burns’ letter to George Thomson; ‘Let our national music preserve its native features, they are, I own, frequently wild and irreducible to the more modern rules but on their very eccentricity, perhaps, depend a great deal of their affect.’ And there is something irreducible in Jack’s work that marks it indelibly and poetically Scottish.

In 1965 he was appointed a lecturer at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art. There he worked closely with Alberto Morrocco, David McClure, Dennis Buchan, Peter Collins and Grant Clifford. He took Third Year students regularly, to Holland, and, during the 1970s, began painting white table-clothes [sic], stacked cheeses, coffee pots, frozen raspberries that took on the monumentality of the pyramids of Egypt! And he revitalised still-life painting in Scotland. Waiting for the Dundee train on Carnoustie station, he would look out onto the beach that William McTaggart had painted (raw, with wind, wave and weather!): Jack Knox painted something very different – a single beach hut as a huge, psychedelic, many-coloured tableau of delight! Such works stand strong beside those of David Hockney.

In 1981 he became Head of Painting at Glasgow School of Art. Consequently the School experienced a second Golden Age. A new generation of ‘Glasgow Boys’ – a talented array of gifted students who were, in many ways, ‘His Boys’ – sent shock-waves of figurative renewal round the globe. Jack gave his colleague Sandy Moffat great freedom – and the GSA played a crucial part in the success of Glasgow as European City of Culture, in 1990.

Having one of Mackintosh’s great studios to himself, Jack became, briefly, a more gestural and narrative painter – with humour part of his armoury (very necessary in the battlefield, Art College politics can become).

From their home in Bearsden, Jack and his wife Margaret Sutherland, holidayed frequently on Arran. The result was a series of small pastels of stunning intensity: blue seas, the measured mile, grouse under gorse bushes, a heron alone on the shore, heather burnings on the mountains…This was a various man and, after taking early retirement, in 1995 Jack returned to the East, to Broughty Ferry.

Jack Knox was an artist’s artist. Like many a Scots painter, he felt a special affinity with France and French pleasure in life. Like Henri Matisse he wanted his paintings to be ‘armchairs to rest in’, sources of thoughtful joy. Jack was a civilised man, a stimulating teacher, a loyal friend. His humanity and his paintings stand with the best in Scot’s History.

 RSA Obituary, taken from the 190th RSA Annual Exhibition catalogue