Was the spiritual aspect something that he incorporated later on, or did he always have that aspect in his work?
He did have that element in his work, although, he was a very different person after he left. He was a very big part of the drug culture. He was a bit of a wild man. He carried a pistol, and he'd ride out into the desert, and fire at anything. We had a mutual friend, Ken Bowman, and they were earning a living by doing batik cloth for the tourist trade and he hated them. There was one of them hanging on the wall in Ken's house, and Jack pulled his pistol out and fired at it and put a great hole in it!

He used to drink a lot. I remember once they told me he was in jail. I went down to see the chief guy, and I said, "Well, what has Jack done?" And he said, "You'd better go and talk to him." So I went down to the basement of the jail, and he was behind the bars, stark naked. I said, "What are you doing in there?" and he said, "I don't know. They just pulled me up the street and they threw me in here. I wasn't doing anything, I was just coming home from the bar." And I looked at him and I said, "Jack, you've got no clothes on." And he looked, and he said "Yeah, where are my clothes?"

He became an entirely different person, you know, when he came here, entirely different. It was like he was reborn, or something. It was an amazing transformation. You know, I always went out of my way to help Jack. I helped him get his first shows in Canada, I got him into the Bau-Xi Gallery, tried to get him selling his paintings so that he could survive. He did quite well at the beginning, but then he was sort of drawn to Texada Island. He was sort of out of the swim, and literally, you couldn't get hold of him.