To A Torch Lighting Our Time And Place

 

To A Torch Lighting Our Time and Place

By Tom Wachunas

Jack McWhorter

Surveyor's Map

Serpent Lightning

Facing North

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:

https://www.beaconjournal.com/obituaries/pwoo0204635?fbclid=IwAR0_IF8a9XPP4Eyzzk9Fs9JdsKkEnb3s6LTLF-Cqs2gbYsCelsC2c-mPD_c

 

   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.

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   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.