SKETCHING one day on Coney Island in New York City, Bill Jacklin's concentration was temporarily distracted by a young boy who walked up behind him. 'What you doing mister, painting people, places and things?' the boy asked, all in a rush. 'I thought that was a perfect description; it's exactly what I do,' said the British artist, whose figurative oil paintings will be on show at the Arts Centre from tomorrow. In late 1993 Jacklin spent three months in Hong Kong as the British Council's first Artist in Residence. For the council it was a new endeavour which came about as a direct response to an arts policy review report identifying visual arts as 'the Cinderella' of the territory's cultural life. For Jacklin, now a youthful 53, it was the culmination of the vague plans of 20 years. Two decades ago he was teaching at an art college in London and one of his students, from Hong Kong, suggested it would be an exciting place to paint. Jacklin never forgot the suggestion. 'The appeal was the energy of the place; it is really like New York in many ways,' he said. Jacklin made New York his adopted home 11 years ago, 'because London was too restrictive'. In New York, he says, there is a sense of contrast and movement he still finds tremendously exciting. 'I've done a lot of painting on Coney Island,' he said. 'In a way it is a ghost town; it is a ravaged, poor depressed place that was built for the bubbling, rich socialites a hundred years ago. 'But you walk for half a mile and there are ethnic communities where there is such a strong sense of living and life. I want to capture that contrast.' While in Hong Kong, Jacklin had the use of the Museum of Art's small basement studios, but preferred to spend his residency sketching on the streets and walkways. 'I would go out for eight hours every day; I'd come back dripping,' he said. And that was in Hong Kong's winter. Often he was a detached observer, seeing images and capturing them on paper, but sometimes his subjects pulled him into their own worlds. 'One day I was in Wan Chai, drawing a snake shop,' he said. 'The man had skinned a snake and took its gall bladder out before he chopped it in half and put one of the bits aside. I was somewhat appalled. 'The man came over, and offered me some snake soup; I made some feeble excuse. He noticed I was having some trouble with copying the sign over the shop, and suddenly grabbed my notebook and wrote the Chinese characters. 'I went down the street and photocopied the sketch, and gave him the copy which he tacked on the wall. So it was a neat equation for all of us except the snake, which was still wriggling away [although half of its body was missing].' Some of his paintings - of a woman spending a quiet, private moment in the red splendour of a neighbourhood temple, of the boats in the harbour - are of the images that have immediate impact on visitors to the territory. But he also became very excited by the walkways throughout Central district and by escalators at Times Square and Pacific Place - places where people are moving with purpose, where the scene is constantly changing. 'A picture is not about possessing something,' he said. 'It is about sequential movement, it is about things coming and going. 'I suppose it's about energy. Last time I was in Hong Kong I gave a talk at the China Club, and I said that my 11 years in the US had been necessary preparation for coming to Central. 'It was a cheap laugh, but in a way it is true, this is such an astonishingly busy place. 'Hong Kong is visually exciting, but there are things here that made me question the way of life. When I see a man running down the street talking into a mobile phone I wonder whether this is the only way, or the best way.' Jacklin spent many quieter hours in Victoria Park and Johnson Road, where old men play Chinese chess, and where casual observers stop to watch the moves with intense concentration. 'Those corresponded with scenes I've painted in New York's Washington Square,' he said. 'I like to paint people who are watching people doing something.' He would often attract crowds of people. 'It must have seemed an anachronistic activity, drawing when you can take a photograph,' he said. He carried his camera as well as his pastel box, but as a figurative painter he admits he has an ambivalent attitude towards photographic images. 'If I sketched you, I could draw you with a gentle gaze or I could be really harsh,' he said, adding that the camera was less impressionistic. 'Photographs represent just one moment and not a series of moments. Paintings pose more questions, or at least they allow more questions to be posed.' Jacklin also made many visits to the wet markets in Wan Chai, where he watched the processes of slaughtering animals, chopping meat and selecting raw delicacies with a mix of fascination and horror. 'The danger is that Hong Kong seems picturesque,' he said. 'But the longer I was here, the less picturesque it became.' His meat stall paintings - soft focus works, where the butchers are pleasantly plump and the meat is more smoky-bacon orange than Francis Bacon red - depict the images with a gentle smile, rather than a deliberate harshness. They do not appear to be a violent reaction against what he termed the 'extreme cruelty' of local market life. 'However much I admire his work, I wouldn't wish to do a Francis Bacon,' he said. 'But I would like to think that if you stayed with my paintings you would encounter other things in them; things that are less picturesque.' Describing his work, which he does with some reluctance, Jacklin talks about the 'asides to Seurat' and other European impressionists that can be seen in his oil paintings. 'Although I like to think that I am working in my own way,' he said. He will spend up to a year on a large painting, constantly re-evaluating it, moving people from one side to another, adding fabrics and textures. 'When you see them my paintings are very craggy, because I have changed them so often,' he said. 'I did one painting that was 12 ft by 12 ft of the Battle of Tompkans Square [where police in New York evicted the homeless from their cardboard shanty towns]. 'I took pictures of it to record the changes I made as I was working on it. In the end it was an entirely different painting to the one I had started.' Incidentally, he said, the painting had been bought by Sting, one of several high-profile collectors of his work. After he left the Royal College of Art in 1967 with a master's degree and plenty of enthusiasm, Jacklin spent five years concentrating on abstract work. He was successful - he sold to museums, gained a following. 'But in 1973 I realised I was painting myself into a corner,' he said. 'I painted one piece of the process of a bunch of anemones - which went from the flowers in a vase into something very abstract. 'But I had committed the cardinal sin and painted something that looked just like a bunch of flowers . . . it made me realise how conservative the avant-garde had become. It had become the establishment.' So he committed 'artistic suicide' and returned to figurative work. 'I went into the wilderness for a while,' he said. One of Jacklin's fondest memories of his time in Hong Kong is of one night when he visited the studio of Gaylord Chan, one of the territory's leading artists. 'We stayed there until two or three in the morning, talking with his students,' Jacklin said. 'They wanted to know everything. 'Hong Kong is not an easy place for artists to develop. But they were very hungry to learn.' Urban Portraits, Hong Kong 1993-95, the Pao Galleries, 5/F Hong Kong Arts Centre from tomorrow until January 24, from 10am to 8pm. Bill Jacklin will also give a lecture, In Progress, in which he will talk about the various stages of an oil painting, at the Hong Kong Museum of Art tomorrow at 7pm
