Kenneth Jack; artist of the Australian outback (GREAT)
Hyfler/Rosner
19 June 2006
Simon Fenwick
Kenneth Jack
Artist who recorded a vanishing world in the Australian
outback
Gorgeous stuff:
http://www.greythorngalleries.com.au/kenneth_jack/index.html
http://www.picturestore.com.au/index.asp
The Australian artist Kenneth Jack painted a vanishing
world - he was a kind of "guardian of the outback". The land
he evoked in his pictures, which he often depicted in the
magical light just before nightfall, was an Australia of
ghost towns, abandoned mine workings, ruined shacks and
barns, recorded as they were about to return to the
landscape where they had been been both constructed and
deserted almost within living memory. It became Jack's
life's work to record this world before its destruction. "I
think he must know Australia better than anyone," the critic
Lou Klepac wrote:
He has been everywhere looking for what exists only in
himself. He may believe that he has been looking for a
vanishing Australia but instead he has gone to restore it to
the places he has drawn.
He has stamped indelibly his vision of Australia on
everything he has drawn and painted. Even when he draws the
Sydney skyline or the streets of Melbourne, one feels that
if one gazed beyond, one could see the outback butting up to
the suburban sprawl. Invisible (and sometimes visible too)
cockatoos inhabit his urban landscape.
Kenneth Jack was born and brought up in suburban Melbourne.
His father, Harold Jack, had studied architecture before
becoming a commercial artist who designed graphics and
posters for the Victorian railways. The young Kenneth drew
constantly from childhood and sold his first watercolours
while still at school. At 13, he won first prize at the
Melbourne Royal Show and in his final year at Melbourne High
School received the top marks in drawing for the state of
Victoria. Meanwhile he had already made use of his father's
staff travel pass, as well as a bicycle won in another
competition, to go on sketching expeditions into the local
countryside.
Aged 18, in December 1942 Kenneth Jack joined the Royal
Australian Air Force immediately on leaving school, and for
15 months he was attached to the Directorate of Works and
Buildings drawing maps and doing lettering. He also attended
evening classes conducted by John Rowell at the Melbourne
Technical College. In 1944 he was sent as a corporal in the
RAAF No 5 Construction Squadron to the Pacific war zone and
he spent the rest of the war in New Guinea, Morotai Island
and Labuan in North Borneo.
His official duties included making contour maps from aerial
photographs but, when he had the time to do so, he sketched
incessantly the life around him. Over the course of 18
months, he made some 500 drawings of the landscape, of life
on board ship or in camp - men sleeping, playing cards, at
work preparing airstrips or in the cookhouse or sawmill, or
of the ruins of buildings wrecked by the devastation.
In 1945, at the invitation of Harold Freedman, the art
editor of the RAAF publications section, Jack had two
pictures published in an air-force magazine called RAAF
Victory Roll: Labuan Mud, a picture of thick mud churned up
by truck wheels on a tropical rain-soaked track, and Dead
Japs Ready for Burying, a subject made even more unpleasant
due to the stench Jack endured while drawing. The whole
collection of sketches and paintings was subsequently
transferred to the archives of the Australian War Memorial
at Canberra.
On his return to Melbourne Jack, through the Commonwealth
Rehabilitation Scheme for ex-servicemen, resumed his lessons
under John Rowell and the printmaker Ben Crosskill at
Melbourne Technical College. Subsequently he gained a
teaching certificate and went on to spend the next 20 years
as an art instructor in the Victorian education department.
In 1950, the same year as his marriage to Betty Dyer, Jack
passed his final Art Teacher's Diploma with the thesis "On
the Drawing of Architecture", and had his first of many
one-man shows as an artist at the Bookshelf Library, Hobart
in Australia. By now he was fairly well-known. His work had
won prizes and been published in a significant art journal,
Australia National Journal.
In 1956 Jack was appointed senior instructor of art at the
Caulfield Institute of Technology, where he founded both a
printmaking and a painting department. (He also served as an
assistant to the Art Inspector of the Technical Schools.)
Some of his most abstract work - his restrained, organised
images included a series of studies of paddle steamers - was
done as a printmaker and two linocuts submitted to the Giles
Bequest Print Competition at the Victoria and Albert Museum
were purchased by the museum. However, he found the
contemporary trend towards abstract expressionism as
fundamentally antithetical to his own creative work, and he
became intolerant of painting not based on solid training.
In 1967 he took six months' leave to try out life as a
full-time artist and with 21 other passengers went on a
five-week bus tour across Australia. They travelled 6,000
miles across some of its most inhospitable country from
coast to coast, experiencing the land's vastness and
isolation. The following year, Jack retired from teaching,
resuming his travels in order, he wrote,
to see and experience places at first hand - places which in
quite a number of places have hardly been tracked by the
artists. And this searching and knowing of the shape of
things belongs to the 20th century in just the same way as
"hard-edge", "colour-field" or "abstact-expressionism".
In a succession of Toyota Land Cruisers which he turned into
travelling studios and with provisions supplied by his wife
("Betty's café" as he called it) Jack journeyed back and
forth across Australia in search of inspiration for his
pictures. He said that if he did not have a drawing done
every morning he didn't feel fulfilled. These sketches, as
well as the photographs he took, would then be returned to
his studio where he transformed them into pictures, always
standing to work however small the picture and however fine
the brush, and - until he became deaf - with his beloved
Mozart invariably playing in the background.
Gradually fashions changed and Jack's portraits of a bygone
Australia came to be recognised as a valid a subject for art
as any other. During the last decades of his life, his work
was widely exhibited and he gained considerable recognition.
He was appointed MBE in 1982 and AM in 1987. With
watercolour his preferred medium, he was elected to the
Royal Watercolour Society in 1977 and he was also a
foundation member of the Australian Federal Government's
Artbank Board and a foundation vice-president of the
Australian Guild of Realist Artists. His commissions
included a mural for the Australian Pavilion at Expo '67 in
Montreal and a tapestry coat of arms for the Australian
pavilion at Expo '70 in Osaka.
His work can now be found in a great number of collections
throughout the world, including the Royal Collection at
Windsor, as well as in the capital city collections of each
state of Australia. There were several publications of his
works including a book, World War II paintings and drawings
(1990), as well as a portfolio of lithographs, Old Mining
Towns of Australia (1984) and a portfolio of linocuts,
Australian Gold and Ghost Towns (1962).
After the war years, Jack did not leave Australia again
until 1973, when he came to England and was able to see the
works of Turner and Rembrandt, the artists he loved the
most, as well as the Boningtons in the Wallace Collection.
Thereafter he came regularly to Europe where he took
pleasure in painting its castles and cathedrals.
Within the past few weeks Ken Jack had had a highly
successful exhibition at the Greythorn Gallery in Melbourne.
He was still checking proofs for a new book of his drawings
while in his hospital bed shortly before his death from
cancer.
Kenneth William David Jack, artist: born Melbourne, Victoria
5 October 1924; MBE 1982; AM 1987; married 1950 Betty Dyer
(one son, two daughters); died Melbourne 10 June 2006.