Bill Jacklin

Chatting over Zoom as he recovers from appendicitis, the Royal Academician tells STEVE PILL about classic scrapes in New York and his recent experiments with illustration

- STEVE PILL

As many of us have found ourselves unable to focus on bigger artistic statements during the pandemic and embarking on unexpected little creative projects instead, it is perhaps reassuring to find one of the western world’s leading painters has been doing just the same. Bill Jacklin is famed for his vast urban canvases that hang in the Tate, the Royal Academy and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and he has regularly completed major projects for the likes of the Bank of England, The Ivy restaurant and Washington National Airport, where a 24-foot mural graces the north terminal. Like the rest of us, however, he found himself scaling back his ambitions during the Covid restrictions and returning to more personal ideas closer to home.

For years, Bill had been working off and on in private on a graphic novel about an “animal creature” for his adopted daughter. With about 100 drawings stockpiled, he was keen to flesh out the story further, so he approached Simon Astaire, his son-in-law from his first marriage and a novelist in his own right. The first draft captured the artist’s imagination in unexpected ways.

“It turned out that, more and more, his story was strong in its own right, so we chose to put that [first idea] to one side,” Bill explains. “Gradually, as his story strengthened, I enjoyed finding images and visuals that complemented and pushed the story, which is something that’s very different from what I normally try to do.”