A pop-up exhibition at Studio 42 in Woodcreek is showing a rare collection of oil paintings by the late San Antonio artist, Jack Fletcher.
Curated by daughter Mary Fletcher Owens, the exhibition includes 13 paintings, two collage works and a work completed by Owens of one of her father’s unfinished canvases. Fletcher’s large oils hang in the expansive, well-lit space of the gallery. In one of the rooms, an urn sits on the painter’s stool between two paintings. Fletcher’s remains are inside. The exhibition is partially an homage to, and partially an emotional release, for the family he left behind.
“This is not an easy show to exhibit,” says Owens. “He was a brilliant artist, but he also was an angry man who left deep marks on his family.”
Owens is a Wimberley graphic artist and fine artist who inherited the love and discipline of art from father and mother, both of whom are artists.
Fletcher’s mastery of the medium is put on display in the pop-up, as well as his bright, edgy palette and expertise in portraiture, composition and capturing spatial relationships. All showcase his experience and commitment to his art.
His style is biting, macabre, and surreal, canted sharply to the dark side where empathy for his subjects appears lacking. Before he painted the works seen in the exhibition, he was a collage artist, which seemed to have influenced his compositions. Most of his canvases are populated by female figures juxtaposed with objects that are rendered flatly or tweaked toward the fantastic. Fletcher’s paintings reveal a deep ambivalence, even dislike, of women. They appear one-dimensional and immaturely eroticized, sometimes portrayed as coarse and foolish, jaded, exhausted or bereft. He renders their distress, not kindly, but superbly.
Viewers cannot help but be fascinated by the energy he exerted in such a demanding art form to chronicle the layers of images, urges, thoughts, and emotions that inhabited his inner narrative. It is not a sweet narrative, but neither is it completely brutish, saved by Fletcher’s skill as a painter.
According to family members, Fletcher most likely suffered from bipolar disorder — a mental illness associated with episodes of mood swings — that was left untreated. He attempted to manage the illness with alcohol, which often descended into violence.
Another of Fletcher’s daughters, Melissa Fletcher-Stoeltje wrote: “My father was an artist. He also was a deeply troubled man who sometimes hit my mother. He left when I was six, leaving behind a trail of vague sensory wisps – the smell of turpentine, the aroma of pipe smoke, the sound of jazz.”
His departure from his wife and three daughters was finalized by divorce which led to a decades-long estrangement on both sides.
A native of San Antonio, Fletcher pursued art early. He was a teenage cartoonist with membership in the Ink Slingers, a national organization of the ‘40s. He studied at the Warren Hunter School of Art and after a stint in the Air Force during World War II, he attended Trinity University, where he was the staff cartoonist for the school paper. He also attended The Art Center School in San Antonio and The Student Art League in New York.
In the ‘50s, Fletcher co-founded the Men of Art Guild in San Antonio. The guild provided the first venue of its kind for artists where they could interact, and MOAG is credited as a stepping stone that helped transform San Antonio into an art-friendly community.
For years, Fletcher conducted correspondence with famed artist Robert Rauschenberg — by whom he was deeply influenced. A fellow Texan from Port Arthur, Rauschenberg gained prominence in New York, starting in the 1950s.
“I consider the text of a newspaper, the detail of a photograph, the stitch in a baseball, and the filament in a light bulb as fundamental to the painting as brush stroke or enamel drip of paint,” Rauschenberg once said.
Correspondence between the two was preserved. During Fletcher’s career, his paintings, collages and other works were exhibited and purchased by museums and collectors throughout the state and the US.
In her twenties, Owens explored a reconciliation with her father.
“I met him in his world, mostly in bars, where he went when he was not in his studio,” she recalled. “In one of our meetings, he spoke of being frustrated by the direction of his paintings, and I suggested that he paint his collages. He took the suggestion and ran with it.”
“For five years I apprenticed with him,” she continued. “He taught me how to build a frame, glue a rabbet joint, blend oils and other skills. When it ended, so did our time together.”
Much of what Owens knows about her father’s life in the years following, she said, came from second-hand information.
“I learned that, in his later years, he became reclusive, especially about his work, which he refused to sell or show,” she said. “When I inherited his paintings, they had been stored in a garage for more than several decades.”
One of the paintings stored in that garage was an unfinished self-portrait of Fletcher with a female figure kissing his cheek. Owens embraced the canvas, painted out the original figure of the woman and portrayed herself kissing her father goodbye. It is aptly named, “Goodbye Jack.”
The work has power and serves “as a bridge,” suggests Carl Owens, Owens’ husband. “Perhaps it’s a bridge between the generations, between Mary’s journey from graphic artist to fine artist. And perhaps to an acceptance of what was,” said Carl, looking at the canvases hanging on the walls of Studio 42.
The show is open to the public Feb. 24–25 from 5 to 9 p.m. at 42 Woodcreek Drive.
MARY FLETCHER OWENS.
PHOTO BY TERESA KENDRICK.
