John Robert (Jack) Craft lives with his family on a commercial cattle ranch in the Texas Panhandle. The ranch is located about 70 miles south east of Amarillo, Texas. His art-work consists of solid cast-iron sculpture and prints that are made utilizing his sculpture as a tool to create abstract images that reflect the mass and the dimensions of the sculpture. The work is an art of place. The sculpture is abstract work that is grounded in geology and the metallurgy of the artist’s material of choice: ferrous metals, and the art reflects the solid values of ranch life. The prints suggest an imagery of vast light-pollution free night skies, or sometimes micrographs of molecular, cellular, or crystalline structures. These prints function in a disorienting manner at one moment evoking the unseen microscopic and the next the vast expanses of outer space. The work is hard, heavy, and sometimes uncomfortably honest, which is a reflection of the artist and his life as a rancher.
