It is rare for a curator to come across an artist with Jack Nixon's talent. With a superb sense of composition and space, while practicing excellent draughtsmanship and rendering, Jack documents and editions grand urban landscapes and vignettes of Chicago with its buildings, monuments, and decorative stone fragments that glorifies the city's late 19th and early 20th century neo-Classic, Gothic, and Art Deco architectural styles.
Working graphite on paper, self-supplied with hundreds of photographs for reference, he achieves a special vision of Chicago that goes beyond reality. Mr. Nixon's drawing of bas relief, such as the four sculptures on the corner houses of the Michigan Avenue Bridge become fine trompe l'oeil reliefs.
Deftly exhibiting [Ivan Mestrovich's] two bronze indian equestrians in Grant Park in bright light isolated from any background authors substantial graphic icons that match their monumental presence at Michigan Avenue and Congress Boulevard.
The Wrigley, Tribune, and Medinah Spires drawing casts a pleasing balance of three spectacular buildings in the best possible light and juxtaposition. Mr. Nixon has subtly crafted a strong contrast between man's hard, linear, vertical ediface with nature's soft, billowing sky that creates a forceful three-dimentional confrontation with the viewer and these historic structures that bysteps weak cliches associated with minor, less adroit illustration.
A master of Realism, displaying a new standard of old-world representation, Mr. Nixon provides us a uniquely contemporary view of architecture as art. It has been a pleasure for the Union League Club to debut Jack Nixon's work. And I urge everyone who gets the chance, to view them in person. Slides and prints, although accurate, only suggest the powerful impact of the originals.
