Jack Stratton

GREENSBORO, NC

Jack Stratton’s depiction of a chimpanzee family in the North Carolina Zoo was painted from sketches made from direct observation of the animals. Stratton and artists, Keith Buckner, Vito Ciccone, Roy Nydorf, and David Thomas, and occasionally Rebecca Fagg, are members of a loosely organized group that spends a day together at the zoo sketching and painting, several times a year. Drawings, watercolors, and paintings by the group are shown annually at The Artery Gallery and have been exhibited at UNC-Wilmington in Menagerie: The Zoo Scenes Artist Group.

Stratton has, over the course of his career, worked closely with other artists and credits his close relationship with painter Linda Tavernise (1942-2009) for inspiring an expressive use of color. According to Stratton, her brilliant paintings of zoo animals gave rise to the group’s gatherings.

"Chimps (The Baby)" is as much about the act of observing wild animals in captivity as it is about the subjects themselves. Stratton captures the moment visitors crowd together to get a peek or video of the newest member of the zoo’s chimpanzee family, a small form barely visible in its mother’s arms. Cellphones and TV remotes figure often in Stratton’s paintings as vectors for visual journeys. Here the small screens echo the glass window of the chimpanzees’ habitat, suggesting that the zoo experience, like other contemporary cultural events, is most often witnessed with some form of mediation. This idea is even more poignant in the context of social distancing.

Stratton’s retrospective at GreenHill includes another painting inspired by working in nature in the company of other artists. The lovely small early painting on view entitled “Painting Party in W-S” (1995) recounts a gathering Stratton attended in Winston Salem only blocks from downtown, with artists Lucy Spencer, Linda Tavernise, Philip Link, and Don Morgan. The bucolic scene of a group of figures lounging in a verdant landscape under a blue sky surrounded by trees evokes Impressionist idylls when young artists Monet, Renoir, Sisley and Bazille ventured into the Normandy countryside to paint together. A figure in the foreground holds up a painting.

Stratton’s treatment of the figures in a semi-abstract gestural shorthand, and his use of black among other vivid colors, also recalls scenes of the natural world painted by early 20th century German Expressionists in the Brücke (bridge) led by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.