John Robert Craft
Biography
John Robert (Jack) Craft lives with his family on a commercial
cattle ranch in the Texas Panhandle. The ranch is located about 70
miles south east of Amarillo, Texas. His art work consist of solid
cast-iron sculpture and prints that are made utilizing his
sculpture as a tool to create abstract images that reflect the mass
and the dimensions of the sculpture. The work is an art of place.
The sculpture is abstract work that is grounded in geology and the
metallurgy of the artist's material of choice: ferrous metals, and
the art reflects the solid values of ranch life. The prints suggest
an imagery of vast light pollution free night skies, or sometimes
micrographs of molecular or cellular structures. These prints
function in a disorienting manner at one moment evoking the unseen
microscopic and the next the vast expanses of outer space. The work
is hard, heavy, and sometimes uncomfortably honest, which is a
reflection of the artist and his life as a rancher.