For Jack, the painterly experience had highest value. He tried to include what he knew to be true of the painterly experience in all other aspects of his life, with varying degrees of success. He excelled as a teacher and his methodologies have touched the lives of many west coast artists and buyers of art.

The mandalas are a particularly easy entry into his mind-set and painterly practice. View each from the outside ring in. Focus carefully on the brush work. Seek the smallest brush stroke. Move to the next inner ring. Do the same. Don't think! If you have concentrated, if there have been no interruptions, you may come to the most important brush stroke of all: the last one, which is the physical embodiment of all the experiences, psychic and corporeal, which bore down on the artist painting toward that centre, central, last expressive stroke. If you find it, the mandala will snap into a three-dimensional perspective, which some say is merely a visual trick and others say is a mystical experience. Then, consider the power of the experience when this viewing process is also included in the hundreds of hours passing in complete silence as the artist leans through the brush into the visual world flickering at the brush tip.

When I set down my brush
Whole Universes vanish -- Empires collapse
and races die away.*

There is no doubt that Jack's painting arose from passion, nor that that passion was consummated at the infinitely fine tip of a brush piercing the neural boundaries of everyday consciousness. The work of Jack Wise is among the clearest articulations of why art remains the last great frontier of the questing spirit.

*Stanza of a poem Jack sent me in December 1974. It may be Jack's own, more likely it is a translation.