Jean Jack

The open road reveals images for my work. I set out with my camera in an adventurous frame of mind and criss-cross the country.

Often it is on the fast moving interstate where I discover, quite by accident, the perfect simplicity of a farmhouse or a barn. I am not interested in the details as much as the abstractions, the way the afternoon sun falls off a slanting roof or tall forsaken grass cradles an old structure or stairs that once led to a seaside path now lead nowhere at all. The challenge is to catch the image with my camera from this inconvenient backstage angle.

America′s heartland influences the bulk of my work - utilitarian structures that have a weathered history are a more hauntingly lonely expression than the congestion of city life. Shapes occuring by circumstance intrigue me far more than deliberate artifice.

Jean Jack was born in Massachusetts and lived and worked in Greenwich, Connecticut before coming to New Mexico in 1990. Jack studied with Marshall Glazier and Leo Manso at the Art Students′  League in New York City. She has been painting images of buildings in landscapes for 38 years. Her paintings have won numerous awards from an impressive roster of judges, including Will Barnet. She received the prestigious Champion International Corporation Award at the Silvermine Guild Center for the Art (New Cannan, CT) in 1985.

In her new series of paintings, she again takes the relationship between landscape and buildings as the initial departure point for the formal investigations of her paintings. The buildings fit themselves into the landscape, and the sky fills in the spaces between the two. In the traditional regionalist parlance, the way this triangle of specifics interrelates is called a ′sense of place′.

There is a poignant sense of unease and even loneliness in the places Jack paints which is underscored by her dramatic contrasts of complementary colors and her equally dramatic transitions between reality and unreality. Despite Jack′s use of very real houses and churches as models, these are realistic paintings only in a sense. ′Idealistic′ is perhaps a better word for the convincing power of the very simplified forms and colors. These bright, sensitive paintings are more of an exquisite arrangement of elements that express an essential feeling about New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas, rather than a view out of a window.

Perhaps, most importantly, Jack conveys the quiet dignity of these architectural shapes as she rearranges them, tries them out from different perspectives, composes them in varying color relationships, and emphasizes the specific beauty of different forms. One senses that she becomes close to her subjects in the way that other artists grow attached to their human models. She paints variations of specific houses from different perspectives and at different times of the year. She loves these buildings for their imperfections and idiosyncrasies; and, it is both impossible and unimportant to know exactly when or where these places exist because they are creations of the artist.