Art and Antiques: Jack Dorsey celebrates his 86th birthday with Legacy show

Jack Dorsey celebrates his 86th Birthday as an artist should: with a legacy art show that displays his particularity as an artist, his “thisness” that friends, collectors and patrons have come to love and his extraordinary skill as a master watercolorist of Washington.

The show is titled “Art and Antiques.” If features Jack’s watercolors painted over the years, some stretching back to the 70’s, but most painted over the last decades of his life. The paintings are a tour de force of an artist who glories in painting subjects “common to experience, uncommon to expression.”

Alongside the art will be antiques. Old tools and things handed down by loved ones, and treasured for the special person, or use, or as a prop for a painting. Sunnyshore Studio’s Artistic Director, and Jack’s son, Jason shares the following story.

“So I have a vision for the show. I want to integrate some of Dad’s antiques and art props into the show. Dad’s something of an antique himself and these items show him. But I know that they are valued treasures. One of those treasures is an old anvil that my friends and I used along with an old forge to make knives out of rebar when we were kids. Dad painted it a few times. It has sat outside in his yard as a “prop” for the past 40 years or so, weathered and rustic and glorious. So I go to Dad and Mom’s house to borrow his truck to haul the anvil and some other stuff up to Sunnyshore Studio. Dad says “what do you want the truck for?” I say, “to get some old stuff for the show.” “What stuff?” he asks. So we march out for me to show him what I want and for him to give approval and basically all you need to know is that WWIII erupts and you would think that the end of the world has come and I hold my ground and Dad digs a trench and shoots some canons and I fire back and Mom gets dragged in and its messy and maddening and momentous and magical all at the same time. And in the end, I get what I want kind of. And Dad hauls his antiques over to the show and sets them up because I’m not about to touch an old falling apart rusted anvil that has sat outside in the rain but God-forbid-someone-damages-it. And because we love each other and love Jesus who forgave us of a lot worse, we forgive each other and all is well.”

Jack turns 86th on Thursday, March 12th! The show opens at Sunnyshore Studio on Friday, March 13th, at 10am to 5:00pm. It continues on Saturday from 10am-5pm. A artist reception and birthday celebration is from 3:00-5:00pm on Saturday. It will be packed with the family and friends, the collectors and patrons, the neighbors and golf-buddies that Jack has collected over all these years because as he puts it, “I’ve made a lot of friends over the years as an artist.”