Jack Dowd

Florida artist Jack Dowd has become nationally recognized for rendering life-size portraits of unique lifestyles and bringing them to public attention. Jack Dowd thinks of himself as an American, contemporary, social realist sculptor and painter echoes style and gravity blend with the significance of the 1930’s Ash Can School; a metaphor for the everyday realities of urban life. He uses real people as models, but alters and exaggerate specific features. His focus on detail is extraordinary. The experience of meeting and working with many different people helped Jack develop an insight into the human psyche that enabled him to endow his figures with humor, sensitivity, pathos, satire and even hubris.

Jack Dowd was born in Queens, New York ten years after the Great Depression and can still recall living through the lingering effects stemming from that era. Next up was World War II and the memories of blackout curtains and masked headlights on automobiles. As a child these events didn’t alter his life but another certainly did. Jack’s father, a railroad engineer, liked the comics. Beyond reading them his father would re-draw the cartoon characters. That interested Jack and for the first-time art was introduced into his life. As a young lad he was always sketching and drawing; leading to his career as an artist.

He attended Adelphi College, Garden City New York and in 1960 became a high chool art teacher on Long Island. He cites the exuberant experience of exploring avant-garde art being produced at the time in New Work as an influence, as well the films and movies of the day igniting his imagination and firing his quest for adventure. “I would laugh, cry tremble as fascinating, LARGER-THAN-LIFE images flashed across the giant screen. I hungered to participate in the adventure.”

In 1982 Dowd relocated to Florida where he began to comment, through his sculpture, on social mores he saw there. Continuing to focus on portraits of “alternative lifestyles” Jack has shown his work at the Jacksonville Museum of ART, Florida; Art and Cultural Center/ museum, Hollywood, Florida; Tribute Museum, N.Y.C; Brevard Museum, Melbourne, Florida; the Ringling Museum, Sarasota Florida; National Sculpture Society, N.Y.C; Guild Hall, Easthampton, N.Y; Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA.; Boca Raton Museum; Vermont Instititute of Contemporary Art; Auburn University, AL; Adelphi University, N.Y.; Florida State University, Goddard Center, OK; Whimsey Museum, Sarasota, Florida, among others.

Dowd travels continually for inspiration and is represented by a family of galleries in the United States an Europe.

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