Dr. Astri Wright is a professor of traditional and contemporary South and Southeast Asian art history at the University of Victoria. Coming from Norway, via grad studies in the US, China and Indonesia, and with a longstanding interest in Tibetan and contemporary art, she first encountered Jack Wise's work through new friend and mentor Madeleine Shields, soon after moving to Victoria.. (correspondence with Angela Andersen, Victoria B.C., March 2001)

Sumerian Jewel Jack Wise

Madeleine Shields' mandala work roped me in, with its richness in colour and its brocade-like layering of symbols, both figurative and abstract. Madeleine told me she had studied with this local painter, and throughout her teaching of the technique of inner dialoguing while exploring and painting your own mandalas, which I was very fortunate to be able to study with her, she kept referring to Jack Wise. Slowly I began to form an impression of Jack and confirmed the immediate kinship I had felt to his teaching philosophy as well as to the first works of art I was able to see.

Madeleine's observation that the link between an active spirituality and a transformative art practice had been lost in the western world but not in the East, was one I shared, and we resonated deeply around this regret. Madeleine told me that Jack's mandala art was "the most integrative and transformative thing" she knew. She believes that it was a technique and process that every artist should be taught. Jack Wise's works, which I encountered first in a private home, stood out immediately to me as work that embraced universal truths on so many levels of form and meaning, rather than offering some degree of universality through themes and meanings, media and techniques which are marked clearly by specificities of locale and time.

Jack Wise's art represents an early, pioneering example of the kind of East-West, North-South, trans-linguistic linkages and exchanges that are becoming one of the central characteristics of 21st century culture. Looking at, thinking of, Jack Wise's mandala paintings, in particular, I am looking through the conceptual iris of a dead painter's eyes, into his mind and soul. I enter the colourfield, energy-field, of the evidence that Jack did break out of patterns within which he was raised and travelled to alien shores and mountains, to learn art techniques few people back home could relate to. Jack was a traveller of the mind and the body, and while he is now gone, his art still testifies to some of his dramatic departures. His paintings are, perhaps, signs of his arrivals, proof that 'Jack was here', deeply, fully, and whole. Still points in a life characterized by searching; vessels containing the stillness of solitude, mapping meditations on the mantras of brush, pigment, and form.

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