I initially considered Jack Severson's work two years ago in The Eighth Dalhousie Drawing Exhibition. His spontaneous pen and ink drawings exuded an intensity that defied their diminutive scale and the miscellany of surfaces he favoured. At our first meeting in his downtown Regina home, the awkward congestion of art work and domestic furnishings struck me as a vivid parallel to thee as a vivid parallel to the saturated atmosphere of his drawings. Introductory appearances of bedlam were misleading, however, as Jack was clearly organized; slides of his work contained in a legion or slide carousels mapped a prolific chronology. During this faithful survey, he scanned the room for the original counterparts of the projected images and intuitively located them - on the mantel beneath a topple of frames, piled in a - on the mantel beneath a topple of frames, piled in a cluttered stairwell or hanging on a dining room wall obscured by his large collection of folk art. He resisted the comfort of a vintage armchair and darting through the house, seized the drawings and presented them to me for the scrutiny they demand.
Jack animatedly recounted the incidents that engendered the drawings. Each diagrammatic or scripted notation served as a catalyst for fervent reminiscence, as if every drawing signalled an intimate souvenir. His compelling anecdotes became inseparable from the apprehension of the work itself. Indeed, their narrative evidence is embedded in the sketches: dates, names of people, places and events, detritus and broken phrases can be unearthed from within the tumultuous environments. The choices of irreverent surfaces, elegant illustrations, automatic writing style, and brutal application of collage manifest an unaffected quality and immediacy. Engaging the drawings is to enter a consuming instant where profound deliberations, incisive observations and lofty aspirations grapple with depraved humour, sordid behavior and corporeal limitations. Jack documents the mercurial interactions of humans through an episodic investigation of the self.
An incorrigible chronicler, he records the course of daily affairs with an economy of means and techniques. Hand-held sketchbooks are a mainstay, due to their portability, but any convenient surface will do, notably soiled commercial paper products: envelopes, postcards, newspapers, posters, advertisements, labels. His fluent drawing method is an inimitable signature; calligraphic lines are effortlessly adapted to yield meticulous illustrations, rapidly scrawled words, and all manner of lively marks and suggestive obliterations. Rendering tools that facilitate swift notation are consistently employed: ball point pens, pencils, fountain pens, India ink or felt tipped markers. Applications of opaque correction fluid obscure or highlight passages of the drawings. Jack routinely sorts his work into time periods and subject areas and has accumulated a sizeable archive that he habitually probes for source material. The registration of quotidian circumstances is a transitional and limitless pursuit; therefore his drawings are rarely deemed complete. The reconstitution of discarded commodities is echoed in a recycling of his own work, as Jack reanalyzes formal aspects, deletes sections of text, rewrites scripts and superimposes fresh images. This ricocheting dialogue between previous and recent work produces an incessantly rejuvenating body of drawings that weigh the moment at hand.
Motivated by a desire for contemplation, Jack's work is intentionally diaristic. The arena of scrutiny is his birthplace of Regina and the urban and rural culture of Saskatchewan, commonly signified by ubiquitous landscape settings and references to local personalities (Mayor Schneider and His Lazy y Boy cat. no. 34), sites (Legislative Buildings, cat. no. 35), and occurrences (Untitled, ($6 million for Lewvan Express way), cat. no 14). He annotates both pleasurable and troubling incidents that affect his current subsistence. Not a day passes without a pictorial and verbal debate in the dog-eared pages of a journal: a hilarious conversation in a doughnut shop, an annoying situation at work, speculations upon the life of a deceased artist, strategies for a prospective canvas, bafflement over feminist consciousness or fierce opinions about the government's construction of a multi-million dollar freeway at the expense of the indigenous habitat.
Grounded in reality or born in the imagination, his trenchant commentaries dissolve perceived borders between elevated and popular customs. Loutish characters engaged in primary behavior (eating, defecating, working, sleeping, thinking, copulating), share congested panoramas with expert representations of voluptuous nudes and monumental horses taken from the annals of art history. In Have Melita Manet Xmas 
, the ghost of Manet's self-possessed nude is exorcised from the seminal painting Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe, 1863, and inscribed on a jumble of Melita coffee labels. This wry hybrid comprises an artistic masterpiece symbolizing unique historical and capital worth, fused to a corporate package of mass-produced goods that is calculated to induce public consumption. Jack unites his cerebral muse with an ingested substance that also answers a craving, albeit a visceral one, devising a kind of brain-food that reflects an absurd reality; the addictive lure of art, caffeine and trademarks. The artist need go no further than the kitchen to mine the civilized horizon. A collage of tomato tin labels form a ruddy backdrop for a haunting death skull in Red, Yellow, Blue and White Skull 
a statement about indiscriminate absorption of mechanically processed and preserved foodstuffs with disregard for natural ecosystems. This threatening apparition materializes again on a bed of Monopoly money 
Skull with Crossbones, a sagacious testament to the current era of advanced Capitalism where the monetary equivalent of goods has become inflated beyond their use-value, establishing a condition of planned obsolescence dictated by financial gain.
Jack holds a magnanimous perspective on artistic practice and appreciates disparate rendering treatments. He liberally quotes a gamut of art historical styles culled from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries alongside graphic cartoons from the weekend funny papers, and cherishes the vital characteristics of naive art. His emulation of these varied methods and their conceptual underpinnings indicates an earnest reverence. Ruminations upon the works of his Saskatchewan folk art mentors (William C.McCargar, H. J. Treherne, Dmytro Stryjek, Jahan Maka), are equally accorded space in his sketchbooks with I conic Americans Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol. Jack envisages an art historical reality without borders. This penchant for heterogeneous expression suitably captures a medley of responses in his self absorbed exchange with art making.
A pragmatic attitude surfaces in his work regarding his own activities. Running commentaries such as "if the lines come through the wash or dry brush then 2 birds with one stone" Ecological Barn, are included in many of the compositions. Frequently, personal reminders to "start bike odometer"and "get another calendar from Bonny"(ibid), are found on the same page. Here the mundane aspects of life and art are conjoined. In thee theoretic realm of art history, Jack demonstrates analytical tendencies when considering diverse aesthetic preoccupations: abstract expressionism, pop art. Adversely, his musings about consequential person-ages query the psyche of the individual behind the myth, in an effort to coax them down to earth. His journalistic entries assume a resolute emphasis: "What did Pollock think ... - while-drunk .. didn't people press him - when he was shy sensitive (sober) didn't anyone ever tell him what a jerk he was - or would he be aware...
Untitled (What did Pollock think . . . ). Habitually, Jack initiates offhand discussions with cultural power brokers, both deceased and living, whose acquaintance he will never know: "no mention of this - (ask miss Solomon)"(ibid). While he empathizes with artists and their endeavors, his estimation of the art system is acrimonious (Untitled (Neo, eh.'), cat. no. 18). It is this sardonic facet of Jack's personality that embraces the flexibility of caricature; it functions as a catharsis for his tenacious views on a range of subjects: politics, ecology, religion, aging, sex. His paramount spiritual kinship lies, however, with the single-minded conviction of the folk artist. To engender work for the gratification it imparts when the need arises, with humble means and crafty inventiveness, impervious to commercial or institutional judgment, is for Jack the noblest vocation.
Emphatically, Jack's is a philosophy of radical contradiction. A trained artist, he covets the untainted eye of a primitive. Impeccably drawn nudes of virginal demeanour grace the rotting surface of an Oxo packet. Colossal dramas are played out on the inside cover of a common, grimy matchbook. His penetrating analyses are circumscribed by absentminded doodles. Everywhere visual and written forms interlock. He mocks conventional notions of spiritual and material longevity, yet, his diaristic practice reveals a desire for immortality. Nonetheless, he sabotages a promising sequential l account by end endlessly fabricating his own history. His reluctance to complete the drawings or approach them as singular entities, overlapping as they must in a continual state of metamorphosis, enforces a cumulative perception when intimately held in the hand.
Jack's pensive methodology reflects the capriciousness of his nature. Anticipating the ceaseless barrage of contests and sensations that a new day brings, he transcribes a profusion of encounters that merge, clash and fade into near impenetrable layers. A host of anomalous characters consume and expel life, engulfed in a ritual that accommodates a hybrid world of utopian and apocalyptic spectacles in alluring yet repellent manifestations. Jack's schizophrenic illuminations chart the dilemma of an untimely humanist cast adrift in a post-industrial vacuum. He adheres to solace, yet his caustic eye predicts a dire finale. On a good day, Nancy and Sluggo cavort unabashedly with Edouard Manet at the New Utopia,, and Jack unleashes a home-grown remedy. On the crushed mementos of an acquisitive culture he marks vestiges of his identity that illustrate his output of living.