Jack L. Gray

Jack L. Gray (April 28, 1927 — September, 1981) was a Canadian artist.

Biography

Early life and education

Jack L. Gray was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia on April 28, 1927. As a schoolboy he loved drawing pictures, especially those of ships at sea, and his talent was recognized and encouraged by Wylie Greer. By the end of World War II he was a student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design during Donald McKay's tenure. Gray never completed his studies at NSCAD, but went out on sketching trips alone, and with his friend and former classmate Joseph Purcell. During the summer of 1947 these two artists rented the loft of a fish store at New Harbour NS and made many drawings and paintings. Gray travelled briefly to Montreal in 1948, to take a course from Arthur Lismer at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. But Jack's evident disinterest in Lismer's classroom sessions soon led to private discussions between the two artists, which proved very fruitful. In those years Gray also spent several seasons at sea with the last of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia's dory-fishing schooner fleet, and amassed a portfolio of sketches, notes and photographs.

Career

His first major solo exhibition was at the Hackmatack Inn in Chester, Nova Scotia in 1948, leading to several commissions. With subsequent patronage from Philadelphia dowager heiress Mary Dayton Cavendish, brewery owner Colonel Sidney C. Oland and his family, Gray gradually advanced his career, living aboard boats in the early 1950s. An early friendship with author Thomas Head Raddall led to Gray's pen-and ink illustrations in Raddall's "A Muster of Arms"; Gray also painted a wartime scene of Duncan's Cove, Nova Scotia for the book's dust jacket.

In the mid 1950s Gray moved to New York, and initially painted in studios on boats in Flushing Bay. He was represented by several commercial New York galleries while living in the city, and briefly occupied one of the Des Artistes flats in the Upper East Side. A body of work from this period later became a well-known series of reproductions, the New York Harbor Collection. However, the collection was incomplete since many of the significant canvas works from that period were already sold. While in New York, Gray became acquainted with folksinger Ed McCurdy, and the two remained lifelong friends. In 1958 an engagement overseas with a Hollywood production company took Gray to Spain, where he worked towards the posters for the film "John Paul Jones".

By 1959 Gray, with the encouragement of US Senator Donald E. Finnegan, had moved to Winterport, Maine, settling in an 18th-century Cape Cod, and painting what later critics, notably art expert Ian Muncaster of Halifax, would characterize as his best work. The Maine studio was short-lived, as Gray sold it in 1961 and moved to Halifax, purchasing a property on the Northwest Arm, with a dock for his boat. Gray negotiated with New York press agency Peed & Gammon in 1961, who arranged for Gray's canvas "Dressing Down, the Gully" to find its way into the hands of newly elected US president John F. Kennedy. This resulted in a July 1962 visit to the White House in Washington by Gray, including a conversation with the President. Bids from many patrons and galleries rapidly ensued. Gray remained friends with Roland Gammon for years afterward.

Gray moved back aboard a boat in 1965, in West Palm Beach, Florida, and began a relationship with galleries on Palm Beach's Worth Avenue that would remain in place for the rest of his life. Concurrently, Gray maintained a summer hideaway near Blue Rocks Nova Scotia, where he continued to sketch his favourite subject, inshore fishermen in small boats. Gray became friends with actor Gary Merrill in Palm Beach. Hollywood photographer Phil Stern visited Gray's Nova Scotia studio in the early 1970's and amassed a huge archive of photographic images of Gray and his surroundings. This photo essay was originally earmarked to be part of a book on the artist's life and work, but the book was not completed. Stern's photo essay remained hidden in the Stern archive in California, and was never published.

In his adult years Gray was known as a witty raconteur and motorboat skipper, and later in his life often sailed across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas. He was a frequent visitor to the Blue Bee Bar in New Plymouth, Green Turtle Cay and was a personal friend to Miss Emily. Throughout much of Gray's life, he patronized family-oriented restaurants that made use of paper place-mats. On these he left drawings using either his sketching pens and pencils, when he had them on hand, or an ordinary ballpoint. The vast majority of these were discarded by restaurant staff, but a few salient examples survive, notably in the hands of the management of Testa's of Palm Beach, Florida.

Death and afterward

Gray was troubled with health issues during his last years. He died after a long illness in West Palm Beach on 4 September 1981.

The value of his works rapidly increased after his death. Art dealers searched for his works by contacting people in Nova Scotia, Maine and Florida. Several forgeries appeared, and more than one work (including a high-profile canvas that was on prominent public display in Halifax) was reported stolen. The artist's early sketchbooks, originally kept in chronological order, were separated by a Halifax dealer in the 1960s, and sold as individually framed drawings.