To A Torch Lighting
Our Time and Place
By Tom Wachunas
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| Jack McWhorter |
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| Surveyor's Map |
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| Serpent Lightning |
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| Facing North |
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| Ptolemy Diagram |
“The act of
painting is a clash of different worlds, which in their conflict with each
other create new worlds. For me, one of the most intriguing aspects of the
studio is the quest for making paintings that have an equivalence in two or
more directions. The paintings derive from a system of metaphors drawn from
physical science. A kind of blank slate which allows me to describe what I
think I know about existing in time and space, history and nature.”
-Jack McWhorter (1950 – 2022)
Obituary:
EXHIBIT: A Celebration of Jack McWhorter’s Life will
take place on Saturday, June 11, 2022 from 4:00 - 7:00 pm at the Fine Arts
Building at Kent State at Stark, located at 6000 Frank Avenue N. W., North
Canton, Ohio 44720. The exhibit will
be on view through June, Mondays – Fridays, 9:00 a.m to 5:00 p.m. Jack's
art will be for sale in the William J. and Pearl F. Lemmon Art Gallery and
proceeds from the sales of his work will go to the Jack E. McWhorter
Scholarship Fund at Kent State at Stark. Contributions for the Jack E.
McWhorter Memorial Scholarship at Kent State at Stark may be sent to the KSU
Foundation, P.O. Box 5190, Kent, OH, 44242, or online at givetokent.org. Please make checks payable to the KSU
Foundation and note "Jack E. McWhorter Memorial Scholarship" on the
Memo line.
_________________________________________________________
Slowly emerging
from some long, sad weeks of mourning, of heart-numbing grief,… of wandering,
of wondering why and what’s next… I
offer this post as an artist, teacher and writer who has known and worked with
Jack McWhorter since 2007. I am blessed and grateful beyond measure.
Blessed and
grateful for my 15 continuous years of teaching Art as a World Phenomenon and Art
History at Kent State University at Stark…all thanks to Jack McWhorter. Blessed
and grateful for all the marvelous, impactful exhibits mounted right here at
Kent Stark, introducing us to remarkable, significant artists from outside our
region…all thanks to Jack McWhorter. Blessed and grateful for the gift of his
unwavering passion for teaching, and for his prolific outpouring of wondrous
original paintings. And finally, for his constant encouragement and support of
my blog. For more than ten years, his paintings have inspired much of my best
writing. Here are a few past observations.
From May 11,
2017 – (Painting Center exhibit in NYC) “These integrated systems
of gestural and chromatic configurations can allow all manner of associations.
They might indicate tangible, scientific phenomena and structures in the
natural world, or signal the subtler workings of life on less visible planes.
In any case, McWhorter continues to construct a painterly calligraphy of poetic
singularities. In his paintings, the mysterious and the mundane are conflated into
elegant coexistence. Here is a harmonious convergence of processes conscious and
intuitive, processes both known and on the ephemeral cusp of coming into being.”
From November 23, 2021 (Painting Center exhibit in NYC)–
“At the core of his aesthetic is a persistent navigation of tensions and
harmonies within symbiotic dualities. His compositions, which he calls “live
surfaces,” are clusters or matrixes of lines, shapes, and patterns that
juxtapose accumulations and singularities, gatherings and dispersals. Like an
explorer’s field notes on remembered sights and sites, places and spaces, his
pictures often entwine a then with a now, as if remembering their own
beginnings even as they are transformed by his imagination into new visual
moments.”
From January 8, 2018, on his “Engraved Fields” exhibit at
Canton Museum of art, which I was honored to curate: “…Jack McWhorter has not set out to imitate
or improve upon the look of nature. He doesn’t woo us with cosmetic,
representational illusionism. Instead, his integrated systems of gestural and
chromatic configurations are first and foremost true to themselves – ongoing
revelations of what I recently heard him describe as his “personal
archaeology.” While they might variably suggest things of private significance
such as landscapes or architectures, or fascinating ontological phenomena in
the realms of biology or chemistry, their meaning is far from exclusive. Think
of them as metaphors for how we as viewers might navigate and process what Jack
has called “…the sites of our intimate lives.” McWhorter’s personal archaeology
in effect invites us to re-discover our own.”
Please join me at
Jack’s Celebration of Life exhibit. Let’s re-discover. Let’s honor, savor and remember.
Let’s be blessed and grateful. Let’s stand in the light of the torch he held so
high.
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