Stephen Cummings' response in 1998 to information on Jack Wise available for public view on the internet was I "fear that Jack should somehow awake and deliver a fierceness upon us for violating his devotion to the tactile object! He refused to be filmed or videotaped, was reluctant to be photographed, and was very disturbed that once I photographed his Texada studio. Howsoever, Jack has passed into us, and into now, and we have to follow the lights as they appear to us! " (Art Gallery of Greater Victoria / Nicholas Tuele email Archives, 19 March 1998).

The following was taken from Karma of the Dragon: The Art of Jack Wise.

Dorje Jack Wise

The cover of artscanada (Winter 1975-76, Issue 202/203) features Jack in his Texada Island studio, his legs folded in a semi-lotus position, at work on a mandala. Despite the limited light from a small window, what appears to be light from a single incandescent bulb overhead and the large visor cap he wears, Jack's face is shadowless -- as though the light which illuminates his face arises somehow from the painting he is working on. His hand holds a small Chinese brush, his little finger just touching the work surface and his eyes, undoubtedly, are focused on the tip of this brush. Another photograph on page one of this issue shows a close-up of his hand holding the brush. The brush tip is almost invisibly fine and the concentration required to control it and to respond to its sudden springy movements is equally fine, and intense.

Jack wrote to me on August 12, 1976, saying, "My own act, as painter was - is - not so much to be permeated by nature or any specific phenomenon, but to pierce through that neural skin - Greenfield is not a place but a condition." "Greenfield" is a colour-field Texada painting which, in a previous letter from me to Jack I had likened to the patternings of lichens on the apple trees outside his log cabin home/studio.

Jack was a wide-ranging reader: he read science, especially physics, the geometries of Wentworth-Thompson and Mandelbrot, and various eastern philosophies. He was a classroom student of Huston Smith (who later founded the Department of Religion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology). He had an audience with the Dalai Lama and was friends with Lobsang Phuntshok Lhalungpa, a former Tibetan state oracle (whose essay on the structure of the Buddhist mandala appears as the Introduction to the catalogue of Mystic Circle, an exhibition Jack curated for the Burnaby Art Gallery in 1973). He maintained friendships with George Woodcock and Lin Chien-Shih among so many others. However, neither Jack's scholarship nor his real-time intellectual engagements sustained his inspiration. The source was personal experience.