Jack grew up in a fading factory town in rural Massachusetts. Studying art at the local Community College he received scholarships enabling him to transfer to Pratt Institute in New York where he received his BFA. Traveling to the west coast, he settled in San Francisco maintaining a vital studio practice and becoming a devoted husband and father. He returned to graduate school earning his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute graduating with The Irene Pijoan Memorial Painting award. In July of 2010 he won the prestigious Tournesol Prize which provides a large open studio at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts through summer of 2011. His paintings are visual poems dealing with myth, and the metaphysics of nature and culture as they collide. He has exhibited his work in New York, Massachusetts, and California.
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
These works carry with them an ethical vision. In a decadent and fractured global village and art world, this vision is deeply needed. Bruno Bettleheim describes this phenomenon of artistic purpose as, “True art… in a strange dialectical process unique to it-just because it stands for the deepest personal statement made universal by disciplined effort- [high art] becomes one of the greatest forces binding people together without lessening what is uniquely personal to them. Art permits them to share with others what all consider something higher.”
These images are a visceral admission of the personal and universal condition of the human creature in its present state. Alienated from while bound by more primitive natural animal callings, we are still reaching for the transcendent and sublime. The work reveals these themes through image and process. Imagery is built upon performative and improvisational gestural systems combined with highly realized figurative symbolic representation. These allegories are informed by discipline and revelation that faces a dehumanizing techno/administrative era.
The technological cannot overcome or unify the unconscious with what lies beyond its understanding. De-sublimated drives are integrated aesthetically to bring the viewer into a realm of emotional redemption, unifying the unconscious with constructive spirituality. The significance of such imagery is towards imaginative transformation.