Engraved Fields: Jack McWhorter

Jack McWhorter refers to his most recent set of paintings collectively as ‘engraved fields.’ The reference is an apt one in the sense that his paintings are fields of a kind, articulated with a painterly calligraphy describing poetic marks. Looking at his paintings is to encounter places where the mysterious, the metaphorical, and the mundane come together for the viewer through expressive brush strokes. On one level, his paintings function as models of connectivity, arrivals, or snapshots of structures and relationships in flux, carrying the evidence of paths that led to their destination. Working up his paintings, they build into overall structures with inseparable components. Jack conjoins various series of procedures to develop visual relationships, including space/scale, and figure/ground.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.