What do you think that Jack would think of having his work posted on the internet and him being a figure of study?
Well, I think Jack's a dichotomy. On one hand I think he'd love it and on the other I think he'd hate it. For public view, I would feel that he would want to say "No thanks", but on the other hand, he was also an egotist, like most artists. I think that side of him would have been delighted that people were interested enough in what he did that they were prepared to put it up on a web site, even though he's not here. I think that Jack's work, particularly in the last ten years of his life, was so sublime that he would be very excited.

Distant Shores #3 Jack Wise

Do you think you can get a sense of Jack Wise the person through looking at his art work?
I think if you're sufficiently receptive, you can. I think that a lot of people would be really excited about seeing Jack's work, through the complexity of it and the interesting relationships between colour and brush stroke and so on - purely from a visual point of view. Then, if they were turned on by the visual, I would think that they would probably want to find out more about it. I don't think that he was ever very well understood, by the public or even artists, except for those people who got into understanding his spirituality about it, and they would find the real Jack, but everybody has got to look for it.

Do you think that he will be remembered as a significant contributor to art?
I think he will. It's difficult to say how much and how it will manifest itself. He's one of the first people who'd lived in Canada for an extended period of their lives that got into that sort of East-West understanding. If the East-West activities continue and grow, as they have tended to be doing, I think that Jack will be more and more recognized as a major influence.

Because of his closeness to Tibet, did he have a reaction to the political situation there?
Oh, I'm sure that he did, internally, but I don't think it manifested itself externally. Obviously it would have been hurting him greatly internally. He was never, in my experience anyway, one to get involved with the world at large. He was a real dichotomy, a real conundrum as a guy. Jack lived in a shack for the last number of years of his life, on Denman Island. He was found pretty well every day in the café down the street with all his friends and buddies chatting away about things, but I don't know what, because I wasn't there. Like I said, Jack was an internalized person, and I don't feel I got to know him nearly as well as I would have liked to. When he left his life, not that he had much money anyway, he wanted to be in the simplest possible way of a plain board pine box, no fancy handles, no fancy anything on the coffin that was it. He just wanted it to be as close to a Tibetan funeral as he could get it.