About J.K. Warden      Jack Warden grew up in the Midwest and received bachelor’s and graduate degrees in literature and philosophy from Indiana University and Indiana State University. A self-taught painter (as he modestly points out, were Monet, Winslow Homer, Edgar Payne and George Inness), Jack has spent the last several years painting primarily along the beautiful Potomac River, although he also works regularly in the spectacular Leelanau County of far northern Michigan, a place of “unsurpassed mystery, magic and gorgeousness.”       Jack is a plein air painter exclusively – that is, he works only outdoors, in nature, year round, from life and never from photographs (this last he considers “counter-productive, ill-advised, wrong-headed ad verging on the immoral”). As a matter of person preference he usually paints on a small – sometimes a very small – scale. “Of late I seem to have become enamored of the 6”x8” canvas panel,” he says. “I can certainly change more for, say, a 20”x24” canvas, but I don’t necessarily find that I can say anymore. And the small paintings (not only mine, either) often have a gem-like character that I like and that one just doesn’t find in the larger pieces.”       In Jack’s view, there is no finer life than that of the artist. “Art is even more essential than science,” he insists. “You can imagine a high culture with no science—there have been many. But a ‘culture’ without art? Would it be worthy of the name? Would it even be human?”       “On the other hand, the artist has a responsibility—to what is essentially human, to the edifying, to what Aristotle called “man at his best.” The artist is not simply autonomous, not “licensed” to give expression to the anti-social and anti-human simply for its shock-value. And only when this responsibility is acknowledged can art lay claim to its rightful place at the very heart of human concern.       “Real art should be a little shocking,” Jack says. “But it should be the positive, joyous, shock of recognistion. Ruskin says somewhere, ‘The finest thing a human soul does in this world is to see something and tell it plainly saw,’ or words to that effect. And that is a shocking statement, is it not? The finest thing? Just to see something and tell about it? But seeing—really seeing—seeing of the sort Georgia O’Keefe had in mind when she talked about what an act of humility it was just to see a tiny flower—may be a large part of what is (if anything is) to save us from despoiling nature and our own roots in it—what keeps us, in the late Walker Percy’s terms, from getting into orbit in outer space with no means of reentry—that is from transcending into the abstract, non-personal void of busy-ness, of reductionist science, of all sorts of inauthentic schemes that are blind to the particular, the individual, to what Capon calls ‘the little, least and lost,’—and to someone in outer space the very Rock Mountains are little and lost!”       Jack Warden is currently represented by the Creative Home Gallery in Reston, Virginia. (His work has been featured in about a dozen DC area galleries.) He is Artist in Residence at Riverbend Park in Great Falls, Virginia, where he is soon to teach a course in beginning oil painting and conduct a monthly series of “paint-along” outings by the river.
Please note that all images on this website are the sole property of The J.K. Warden Collection, and no reproduction of these images is allowed without the express written permission of J.K. Warden. © 2005 J.K. Warden • All rights reserved