Jack Donnelly was born in Portland, Oregon in 2001 but after a few years he moved with his family to Bloomington, Indiana where he grew up. As a twin, Jack always tried to be independent of his twin sister and become his own person, developing interests personal to him; the most prominent being his interest in art. Jack started with an interest in realism, drawing graphite portraits as detailed and true-to-life as possible, even selling pieces to friends at school for extra practice.
With an emotional drive, Jack let his heart lead his work, taking on darker topics like death and mental illness. Jack would surround himself with as many types of art as he could, taking an avid interest in researching musical art as well as designing and thrifting clothing. Jack drew inspiration from many movements and periods including, the postmodern movement, the surrealist period, the cubist style, and the neo-expressionist movement where he found great inspiration from Jean Michel Basquiat.
Jack excelled in the use of digital applications like photoshop and became the top graphic art student in his high school. This graphic art has become Jack’s primary medium.
“I have always been interested in how when you construct a figure it is considered art but at some point, you are imitating life. I think that everything is art, but I like to mix realism with more abstract styles to express the complexity of our world. This mixing of styles is my way of commenting on how fascinating it is that we have so many ways of expressing the same idea. I could draw a detailed figure of a man; blending shadows and highlights, measuring every precise angle, or I could carefully combine colors and circles and curved lines, with seemingly no meaning on their own, to create the figure of a man so the same. I have fun using both tactics, like painting while wearing mis-matched glasses; the right lens a piece of broken, orange-tinted glass from a bottle, the left lens a clear, clean-cut piece of glass from a microscope.”
