In a 1996 letter, he wrote "I'm looking at a stone which I stole from the Bison-gallery at Altamira - long before they closed the caves to or from public visitation." I remembered a story Jack told me about how he came to paint rocks. He was on a trip to Spain; and in those caves he particularly admired a cave painting of a bison. He wondered how the artists who made the painting did so (their technique) and why they chose to paint bison (to celebrate a hunt?). When he emerged from the caverns and looked at his stolen stone, he saw the distinct, unmistakable outline of a bison in the natural formation of the stone itself. He said, "I suddenly realized that they [the artists] hadn't been painting BISON, they had been painting STONE!"

I think this was a very important moment in Jack's life as an artist. This moment of revelation helps in understanding his approach to painting, especially how he came to populate his formal mandalas with fields of calligraphy. I think it also helps to explain his preference for gouache and pigment.

If you take the insight literally, "I am painting stone," and change the syntax slightly, you get a metaphysical statement, "I am painting-stone," in which painting-stone is a noun. Thus it is appropriate that the paint be stone-ground pigment and the surface, solid rock. The technical distinction between paint and rock surface blurs -- and probably at moments of greatest concentration, the distinction is eliminated altogether. At those moments of greatest concentration Jack had the mystical experience of becoming the painting event, that is of selflessness within an aesthetic moment. It only makes sense that he would look at and, at various times, embrace Zen, meditation, Buddhism and other eastern activities which offered confirmation of the experience of selflessness.

Jack painted on rocks; on paper and canvas he painted mandalas, colour-fields, magical calligraphies with angels. He told me that on Texada Island he painted on driftwood and rocks at the beach in water-soluble ink and left them there for the tide to deal with. He also painted on left-over popcorn and tried ink he made from mushrooms (which later grew and dusted framed drawings with spores)! He exhibited the products of these activities in a way which frequently frustrated gallery owners: he refused to price a painting higher simply because it was bigger.