Nicholas Tuele became closely involved with Jack Wise and his work. As the former Chief Curator of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, he was responsible for the creation of the retrospective exhibition of Jack Wise's work "Karma of the Dragon: The Art of Jack Wise" and the accompanying exhibition catalogue. (interviewed by Angela Andersen, Victoria, B.C., February 2001)

Was his Mandala work a culmination of his various artistic, personal, spiritual and professional endeavors throughout his life or did they spring from a specific point in time/place/experience?
The Mandala paintings were his major preoccupation and stand as the most important body of work that he produced. I recall that he once told me he made at least one a year for more than 25 years. These paintings are not mandalas in the traditional sense of the word but are rather intensely personal revelations that somehow transcend to the universal.

Is it possible for viewers of Jack's work to find a sense of who he was, or did he completely transcend himself (I believe his expression was to leave behind the "meat puppet")?
It is possible for viewers to find a sense of the artist, particularly in the Mandala paintings, but they require an extraordinary amount of decoding that has not yet been accomplished.

Figures in Spain Jack Wise

Were his series projects meditations on a theme or attempts to embellish and improve upon particular subject matter?
I believe that any of the works, which he produced as a series, were sustained meditations that exemplify his extraordinarily rich and complex artistic sensibility.

There is very little information on his personal politics and participation in what could be called organized religion (though certainly a strong sense of spirituality). What are your thoughts on this?
Jack abhorred organized religion of the Western world but had a deep and abiding relationship to Buddhism, particularly Tibetan Buddhism. You are quite right about his strong sense of spirituality, as evidenced in his daily life and in his work as an artist.

What is the piece that moves you the most that he created?
I have started a project to try and relate aspects of the artist's biography to the particular Mandala paintings made in any given year. I am also particularly struck by the abstractions such as Brownian Movement. The artist was extremely knowledgeable about particle physics and quantum mechanics. Many of his abstractions were meditations on the nature of reality at the subatomic level.

What do you think the lasting impact of his work will be?
I have a sense that in the next few decades more and more people, including both scholars and the general public, will find the kind of work that Jack Wise produced of very special import. There are already a number of artists who work in a similar vein and this will surely produce a resonance down through the ages.

What are your personal thoughts on how Jack Wise fits in to the world of painting in Western Canada? Can he be placed in a 'school' or category?
In my opinion, Jack Wise is singular. However, art historian Shiara Alwis argues that he belongs in a tradition of artists of the Pacific Northwest who share a fascination for the philosophies of the Orient. Artists like Tobey, Callahan, Graves and others form a "school" that she describes in the catalogue the AGGV published to accompany the major survey that I produced of Wise's work.

Was he more passionate about his free form calligraphic work or the precise and detailed work that characterizes his Mandalas?
I don't know for sure, but I suspect that both kinds of work went hand-in-hand. A comparable example may be seen in the art of Richard Ciccimarra who made large, compelling, serious works but interspersed his application at this level with beautifully detailed "finger exercises" that were images of flowers and fishing flies.