In 1974, Jack Wise helped found the Victoria College of Art. It was intended to function as a non-profit, post-secondary institution for art education, that would allow students to work outside of the college and university system. He taught classes there, and many of his students went on to further study of the brush work that he focused on.

In 1984, a group of Victoria-area artists, including Robin Hopper, Flemming Jorgensen, Carol Sabiston and Rhona Murray began the Metchosin International Summer School of the Arts (MISSA). It was intended for artists and educators looking for further inspiration to allow them to develop in a more satisfactory way, in the setting of Pearson College of the Pacific, in Metchosin, B.C. Flemming Jorgensen contacted Wise, who taught at the school for 5 summers, with the increasing burden of failing health. Wise focused on brush work in these classes, teaching mandala painting only once. Wise continues to be listed as an ambassador for the MISSA programme, and brush work courses in his calligraphic, experiential style are taught each year by former student Lorne Loomer.

Potter and MISSA founder Robin Hopper explains the process of the brush work instruction:

Students would go down to the wood pile and select pieces of bark from fir trees, generally, or cedar trees, and they'd pound one end of it until it became fibrous and like a brush, and that's what they used for making marks with, which is probably one of the earliest forms of brush that was ever used. The whole process from finding your piece of wood to pounding it with a rock and so on was a meditative process. It got you into a headspace to be able to work with that tool, and ink, and paper, to develop your art. (interviewed by Angela Andersen, 02/01)

Wise was an artist in residence at the University of Calgary, where he influenced other artists in connection with Lin Chien-Shih's circle. He led extremely popular workshops on Chinese brushwork in many locations, but rarely took private students.

It seems that Jack Wise made many of his life experiences into a lesson of some kind, whether it was how to focus energy into the tip of the brush as it crossed the paper, how to meditate on the creation of a mandala painting, or how to view the events of daily life, as Bill Porteous explains:

Jack and I would go out for Chinese tea - we liked going to China town. We'd take turns buying lunch, because neither of us had a lot of money, but we enjoyed each others company and I looked up to him and he, I think, appreciated what I was doing. We were out at a restaurant and I was complaining about something, it doesn't matter what, and Jack said, "Well, Bill, can you show me what you are upset about?" I said, "What do you mean?" He said, "Well, can you put it on the table here, so I can see it?" I said "no." He said, "Well, then what is it? What are you upset about? Are you upset about being upset?", which is a very Zen kind of approach to things. So, he was kind of tapping me on the shoulder, like they do in Zen, and saying, you know, "Wake up. Your consciousness is drifting, here." And I said, "Thanks." That was good, and I learned something from that. (Bill Porteous, interviewed by Angela Andersen, 02/01)

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