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In terms of
your interest in his work, what is your favourite piece, or one that
moved you the most?
I happen to own my favourite piece, Year of the Horse: "Painted
in the ochre of earth reds and greys of primitive Indian art."
The first I ever saw of Jack's work was an article in the Sun,
when he maybe had his first exhibition out in the Kootenays. This
is back in the 60s. That was when he started using brush stroke to
form pictures, but they were really words. So you could actually see
the mountains.
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Celtic Cross
Jack Wise
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The last piece
Jack did, which he showed us, it's a yellow mandala. I just realized
this, but when I visited Chien-Shih for the last time, he took me
to his studio and showed me what he was working on, and he drew out
what he needed to do before he died. His final works were also yellow.
I don't know the meaning of that, but they both finished with yellow
works. Chien-Shih hadn't done any kind of major use of yellow up to
that point, till those last works, but some. These final works are
just almost a celebration of yellow.
What do you
think he would think of having his work posted on the internet?
Oh, I think Jack would think that was terrific. He liked to have his
work out. As far as I know, Jack never had a retrospective of his
work, a really major retrospective. The one they did at the art gallery
[Victoria] a couple of years ago was a very nice exhibition, but it
wasn't thorough enough. It didn't go back. I know for sure that Chien-Shih
would have loved seeing his work up on the internet. He really loved
technology and using what was there. He figured everything that got
created, it was for a purpose. I never saw him turn up his nose at
anything.
What do you
think he had more passion towards, his mandala work or his black and
white brush work?
It was all brush work, all of it. I think he would call his black
and white work his calligraphy, but if you look at his mandalas, they're
both calligraphy. So they're not separate. The painting that he had
been doing was also a cycle of objectifying what had been going on
inside, aesthetically.
So you think they're both part of a process? Yes, and he actually,
he said that to me. He talked about when he painted on rocks, he did
that to demonstrate that it was a process, that it was about energy.
In a way, the painting on rocks is like the Inuit 'sculpt to let out
what's already in there', the energy, how it forms, releasing the
form. He said about his rock paintings that, "They were to transcend
duality of the painter and that being painted. They were not out of
control, but a dance between interpenetration between that which is
burgeoning and the consciousness that is emerging."
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