Jack Wright

Art Brokerage: Jack Wright American Artist: b. 1919-2003. John "Jack" Cushing Wright's career as an artist mirrors the growth of American culture that came to prominence after World War II. Born in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1919, he showed the inclination to be a painter at an early age. This was galvanized when he studied with the painter Cameron Booth at the St. Paul School of Art in the late 1930s. Booth introduced him to modernism and the work of Giorgio de Chirico, Eugene Berman, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Henri Matisse. Booth's combination of art historical instruction and personal guidance helped pave the way to Wright's artistic devotion and open-minded ideas based on personal liberty and individual expression. He saw the possibilities that being an artist could offer him and experienced the freedom that comes with independent forethought. These early years expanded his horizons and set a lofty standard for his own artistic pursuits. A pivotal moment in Wright's growth came in the mid-1950s when he met the English painter Gordon Onslow Ford. Onslow Ford had been one of the original members of the Parisian Surrealists. Through Onslow Ford, Wright was also introduced to a group of painters and sculptors with whom he would go on to collaborate with for decades to come. John Anderson, J.B. Blunk, Richard Bowman, Fritz Rauh, and Lee Mullican, along with Onslow Ford, would form a veritable "lost school" of California artists. His paintings often have a geometric base that creates a visual platform for us to stand upon as we engage his shifting luminescent world. In other places the dots drift together to form energetic masses that manifest thoughts of the cosmos and phantasmal apparitions. Listings wanted.