Teachers Of Mine: Jack Richards

My introduction to drawing the figure from life was my Drawing I class with Jack Richards at SVA Savannah. Jack considers himself less a "painter" and more of an all-around renaissance man, but I was inspired by his painting nonetheless.

I worked for Jack as a studio assistant for a few different projects including set paintings for the Hilton Head Ballet and a series of paintings about flying food.


I blocked in the backgrounds on this flying pizza, one of my favorite Jack paintings. I don't think I even realized that there would be a flying pizza in it.

Much of Jack's painted work has an anachronistic quality that attracted me as a young student. He has a method of purposefully putting cracks in the surface involving making his own traditional rabbit skin and marble gesso and crumpling the canvas before stretching. It really does effectively make the painting look a century old.


As a student I did a portrait of Jack, but don't know what became of it.

Jack is a self-made expert on paranormal-type things, and had a wildly successful "Ghost Walk, Ghost Walk" tour company in Savannah. I think this painting is somewhat of a Stonehenge meets crop circles thing. It's got that cracked surface too.

Jack does not seem to have an art website, so I don't have very much biographical information on him, but maybe it's more interesting that he remains a little mysterious and enigmatic, like his work.