Reviews
An appreciation
December 2016
Jack Coulthard, the man and his paintings
by Jack Gardner, Author
These few, rather disjointed paragraphs, are not intended to be a comprehensive biography of Jack Coulthard's life, nor a particularly penetrating enquiry into the meanings, complexities or significance of his many works. I leave those tasks to the army, which I am sure is already gathering at the gate, of academics and PhD students, ready to tell us what Jack meant.
Here, I am eulogizing about a man. Not any man, but one of considerable cultural significance, written, rather oddly, as if he might read it himself. So don't expect the considered prose of the obituarist, nor a Socratic apology.
Press Release: A Retrospective exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture at the Byram Gallery, Taunton.
1 October - 20 October 1990
Jack Coulthard - A Coming of Age 1969-1990
by Bill Weir, Director of Byram Gallery
Jack Coulthard lives in Kingston St Mary, near Taunton, but is an artist of international reputation. This retrospective exhibition, covering the 21 years from 1969-1990, of some eighty paintings, drawings and sculptures, has great power and drama as a body of work. The artist is a novelist and poet, and literary references from writers like Ezra Pound, Joyce and Kafka mix with myth and legend to feature prominently as a source of inspiration.
Exhibition Review: A Retrospective exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture at the Byram Gallery, Taunton.
1 October - 20 October 1990
Jack Coulthard - He really means it!
By Jack Gardner
Like religious icons, Jack Coulthard's paintings glow with the certainty of an artist who's talents and vision are at their peak. His paintings are so dense in content, so perfectly executed that, like icons, we expect to see them alone, each painting as complex as a novel, glowing.
Exhibition Review: Jack Coulthard - Stansell Gallery, Taunton - 1994
The Face
By Sebastian Brogue
It's not often that you feel like trying to persuade people to look at paintings. It's a thankless task, not helped by the endless stream of mediocre slabs stuck up around corridors and foyers of buildings in a feeble attempt to persuade us that by defining a shape, that art must exist within it. Paintings are never defined by what is around them, only by what is within them.
Exhibition Review: Essential Sustenance at the Brewhouse: Paintings by Jack Coulthard
Images of what might have been
By Roger Coward
If you enjoy skilled workmanship - then that alone is a basic reason for going to the Brewhouse Exhibition of the paintings of Jack Coulthard entitled "Images of what might have been" (after all he was in the Royal Engineers). He was also with a Bond Street Gallery for eight years - and one can understand why: and inspection of the paintings indicates a brilliant mind at work behind them and a richness of allusions within them.
Exhibition Review: Mercury Gallery, London - November 1976
Two Landscape Artists of Idiosyncratic Style
Daily Telegraph, November 1976
By Terence Mullaly
Coulthard juxtaposes glimpses of landscape, or figures, painted with precision, with large areas of flat colour or with bold abstract patterns. Sometimes all three are combined in one picture. The result avoids being merely decorative. On the contrary, he achieves an impression of strangeness, of tension, which becomes compulsive. I know of no parallel in the art of our time.
