Jack Dowling featured in WestView News April 2016 series
West Village Original

Jack Dowling spent the first two decades of his life in New York City as a painter. “There were centers of activity in the Village and I just quietly began to paint,” he says. “At some point I gave up painting abstractly because I wasn’t sure where that was going. One day, I picked up a snapshot of my parents on their wedding day and decided to make a painting from that. I developed that into a kind of semi-abstraction and got very involved in the sense of light, color, and shadow. That resulted in a whole series of paintings that had their initial source in photographs.”

What made him stop painting and take up writing? “It sounds like a sob story,” he says, laughing. “I had a large loft and I got involved in a court case trying to save it. It cost me money that I didn’t have, which sent me into the job market and diverted me from my painting. After three years, I lost the loft and I was homeless at 40!” He laughs. “But I got myself reorganized and into WestBeth in a ‘starter’ apartment. I was still working at the job that I had gotten to survive but I had also decided I didn’t want to paint anymore. In the meantime, I began to jot down various short observations and channel my creative energy in that direction.”