Biography

Jean Jack studied with Marshall Glazier and Leo Manso at the Art Students League in New York City. Her paintings have won numerous awards from an impressive roster of judges, including Will Barnet. Jack takes the relationship between landscape and buildings as the initial departure point for the formal investigations of the paintings. The buildings fit into the landscape, and the sky fills the spaces between the two. In the traditional regionalist parlance, the way this triangle of specifics interrelates is called a 'sense of place.' Perhaps most important, Jack conveys a 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 certain forms. One feels that she becomes close to her subjects like other artists grow attached to their human models.

Artist Statement

The open road reveals images for my work. I set out with my camera in an adventurous frame of mind and crisscross 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 with a weathered history are more hauntingly lonely than the congestion of suburban or city life. Shapes occurring by circumstance intrigue me far more than deliberate artifice.