Jean Jack has been painting images of buildings in the landscape for close to forty years now. In her paintings, it is the relationship between landscape and structure which she finds so fascinating and which serves as the initial departure point for the work. A “sense of place” is established in each piece as the buildings fit themselves into the landscape, and the sky fills in the spaces between the two.
There is a disarming simplicity in Jean Jack’s compositions that allows the viewer to experience a whole variety of ideas and emotions. Sometimes one feels a sense of unease and even loneliness and, at other times the warm associations of family, home and hearth. Dramatic contrasts of complementary colors punctuate her work along with her equally dramatic transitions between reality and unreality. Despite Jack's use of very real houses, barns and churches as models, these paintings are less realistic than 'Idealistic' owing to the simplified forms and colors. Her paintings are metaphors for our communities, shelters, warmth and social status while, at the same time, records of the quiet dignity in specific American architectural forms.
Jean Jack was born in Massachusetts, and lived and worked in Greenwich, Connecticut, before moving to New Mexico in 1990. 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, and in 1985, she received she received the prestigious Champion International Corporation Award at the Silvermine Guild Center for the Art in New Cannan, CT.
For more information on Jean Jack, please read her vitae.
