Ashley Jackson: Yorkshire artist talks us through his 60 years behind the easel

He was already painting the kind of brooding landscapes that have since become his calling card.

“I don’t like to paint pretty pictures,” the young artist says in response to being asked if all his paintings depict rainy days. “If you like a pretty picture, well buy a box of chocolates and then you’ve got one.”

He might sound a bit prickly but what comes across in this film reel is the sense of an artist with a clear vision and a young man in a hurry. What’s striking, too, is that all these years later he’s still painting his beloved Pennine hills. Oh, and he still doesn’t care for chocolate box-style paintings.

It’s now 60 years since Ashley Jackson started as a professional artist. His remarkable story is well documented but worth recounting. The self-styled Yorkshire Artist was actually born in Penang, Malaysia, in 1940 and his war-torn childhood was rootless and, at times, traumatic. His family fled from Singapore to India and then moved to the UK.

Ashley was nine years old before he set foot in Yorkshire, by which time his father was dead – executed, he would later find out, in a Japanese PoW camp just weeks before the end of the Second World War.

The absence of his father had a profound effect on him growing up. He didn’t get on with his stepfather and later filled this hole in his life with surrogate father figures such as Ron Darwent, who gave him his first proper job, and the Barnsley MP Roy Mason.

It was Yorkshire, or more specifically the Pennine hills, that anchored him and gave him a sense of belonging. He was smitten with the wildness of the moors and this landscape became the focus of his work.

Today Ashley is a renowned artist not only in this country but around the world, but back in the 60s he was very much swimming against the tide. At the time, the colour-saturated pop art of luminaries like Andy Warhol and Peter Blake was all the rage, yet Ashley followed an altogether different path, taking his cue from the old English watercolour tradition and the likes of Thomas Girtin, Thomas Gainsborough and his hero, JMW Turner.

He studied at Barnsley Art School. “I did signwriting, life drawing and all the different types of art at college, but I knew I didn’t want to be a teacher. I respect teachers but I didn’t want to be one,” he says.

After leaving college he worked for Ron Darwent, a well-known signwriter and glass gilder, for the next seven years before setting up on his own.

His father-in-law knew the landlord of the Thornley Arms, a pub in Dodworth, which happened to be next to an old band room which was available to rent for the princely sum of £1 a week. With a bit of elbow grease, Ashley turned the outbuilding into his first studio-turned-gallery, doing signwriting jobs by day and honing his watercolour skills at night and on weekends. “It was hard in the early days but every month things were happening so I knew I was doing the right thing.”

Within a year or so he was picking up regular commissions and able to drop the signwriting jobs. His work went on display in a gallery in Brighouse in 1963 and the following year he had his first solo exhibition at Newark Art Gallery in Nottinghamshire.

Another key moment came at the end of the decade when LS Lowry visited his gallery. “He didn’t drive so it was a chap called Colonel Knowles who drove him and I recognised him straightaway. He sat down and I was in awe of him but he said, ‘I’m only human.’ He said he’d come to seek me out.

“At that time I had an exhibition at the George Hotel in Huddersfield and Lowry used to go in there. I remember him saying to me ‘I take my hat off to you, sir, as I will to any good watercolourist and you are one of the finest there is.’ I was just speechless.”

It marked the beginning of a friendship between the two men that lasted until Lowry’s death in 1976. “I used to go and see him once a week at his home in Mottram and we would talk for hours.”

Despite saying he didn’t want to be a teacher, Ashley has proven to be an exceptionally good one. He started teaching inmates at Wakefield Prison in the late 60s (which saw him featured on a BBC Omnibus programme) and since then he has staged countless workshops and visited numerous schools to share his passion for art with children.

His knack for making watercolour painting accessible to ordinary people made him a natural on TV and led to him appearing regularly on Pebble Mill at One and then having his own programme, A Brush With Ashley, on YTV which ran for 12 years until 2001.

His straightforward and sympathetic approach encouraged people who had always been interested in painting but had never dared try to give it a go. And the number of artists working today that he has inspired is testament to this.

For Ashley, though, it all comes back to his muse – the moors. “Some people see them a bit like a haunted house but they’re not to me. I feel spirits on the moors, I always have. To this day I still feel the same as when I first went up there.”

Years of experience have also taught him when it’s a good time to go out sketching. “Cloudy days are good because you get composition in the skies, but when it’s totally overcast and raining heavily, then you can’t see anything so there’s no point. But if it’s a thundery sky and the wind is moving everything along and you get breaks in the clouds, then it’s a different kettle of fish,” he says.

Even now, at the age of 82, he still goes out with his notepad and to prove it he shows me a series of recent sketches looking out towards Pole Moor and Scammonden.

“People often think I churn my work out but I never have. I paint nearly as many today as when I first kicked off because it’s about the passion you put into each one. Afterwards you’re drained inwardly, you can’t just go straight out and do another one.”

Looking back over the past 60 years, he says he has been a lucky man. “I’ve mixed with all sorts of people and had a hell of a life, but I wouldn’t have been able to do any of it without my family, and my wife Anne has been my rock.”

His paintings have been admired by everyone from kings and queens to presidents and prime ministers, and he has enjoyed solo exhibitions all over the world including in London, Milan, Chicago and New York – not bad for someone who started from a disused outbuilding in a former pit village.