Setting aside brushes and palettes, Jack Bryan starts each painting by squeezing acrylic paint directly from the tube onto the canvas. Pushing and pressing the paint with his fingers, he spreads and streaks colors to evoke natural landscapes.
TEACHING WORKSHOPS
IMPROVISATIONAL JAZZ
“I start out with third-grade finger painting and keep working to next state,” he said. “I try to keep that first energy alive through the painting. I react to each mark, each motion, for my next state. It’s a lot like jazz: It goes from chaos to order, which is why I call it improvisational.”
“Fingers and Brushes: Improvisational Landscapes,” currently showing in the East Gallery of the Oklahoma State Capitol, highlights a selection of Bryan’s dynamic, nature-inspired paintings.
After graduating with a bachelor’s of fine arts from the University of Oklahoma and a master’s in art history from the University of Tulsa, Bryan founded the Department of Art at Cameron University in Lawton, where he taught for more than 30 years.
TEACHING WORKSHOPS
When he retired in 2000, he dedicated more time to painting and started teaching workshops to people with little or no art experience. Through these workshops, Bryan developed a process of building up painting “states” that he said takes the “fear factor” out of painting. He works from finger painting to rags and brushes, with bursts from a hair dryer in between.
“It is about light and movement and the interaction of color,” he said. “It’s all about the visual dialogue of flow “? that improvisational thing where you do an action and reaction, and you continue on until you see that’s where you need to stop.”
Sponsored by the Oklahoma Arts Council and curated by Alyson Atchison and Amber Sharples, “Fingers and Brushes” features meadows under dramatic skies, tumultuous rainstorms, and mountains with evening sunsets. The paintings represent four series of Bryan’s “Landscape Improvisations”: the “Cedar Tree Series,” the “Interior Creek Series,” the “Mountain and Sky Series” and the panoramic “From the Windshield Road Series.” All are studies of light rich with pattern from his meditative process of letting each addition of paint guide the next.
“I set up a landscape below and really get expressionistically involved in the sky and let things flow off my hands and thumbs, or take a razor blade and scrape some of the paint off,” he said. “I’m kind of a hyper guy, and my painting is no different.”
IMPROVISATIONAL JAZZ
Bryan is also influenced by the way improvisational jazz responds to each sound and the stream of consciousness style of the Beat poets, like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. In “Buttercup Stars Below Red Mountain,” the night sky comes down to fill the shape of the peaks; in “Sun Breaking Through Chinaberry Trees,” the fracture of light through branches is re-created by playing with the concentration of light and dark colors. The “Interior Creek Series” shows what it would be like to lie submerged under a creek, looking up at the sky, with the light from a campfire or approaching storm mottled by the water.
Exploring the Wichita Mountains, the Quartz Mountain area, the Red River, and Otter Creek inspires his natural themes, as well as views from his highway drives from Oklahoma to Santa Fe. While the terrain is diverse, the thick, swirling paint strokes from finger painting and emphasis on movement connect his works.
“A lot of my favorite artists came from the mid-1800s to 1916,” he said. “I really like the German expressionists, and also Henri Matisse, Vincent van Gogh and Andr
This article appears in Dec 9-15, 2009.