A Renaissance Man Of Texas Persuasion:

The Artistry of John Bruce “Jack” Erwin

By

William E. Reaves, Ph.D.

And

Bill Cheek

After a full and productive career, Jack Erwin has earned the distinction “renaissance man” in the every sense of the word, and, as such, merits a special place in the state’s fine arts community..  His art works have been declared genuine Texas treasures, inviting rediscovery and renewed appreciation.  In his time he has possessed a rare elixir of artistic talent, fine craftsmanship and disciplined intellect which have enabled him to create master works on canvas, craft musical instruments of renown and design buildings of strong form and functionality.  During a lifetime as artist, architect and violin maker, his body of work, regardless of realm, reflects a mastery of medium, sensitivity to detail and excellence in affect.  His story is that of a Texas artist, developed and played out, for the most part in his native North Texas, and is representative of quiet accomplishment and understated genius that we have come to associate with members of his “greatest generation”.

John Bruce Erwin was born in Jacksboro, Texas on September 18, 1920.  His father located in this small Northwest Texas town during World War I and assumed a position as cashier of the First National Bank of Jacksboro.  By the time that young Jack came of age, during the midst of America’s Great Depression, his father had resigned his position with the bank to become consignee of the Gulf Oil distributorship for the greater Jacksboro area.  As a teenager, Jack eagerly assumed a role in the family enterprise, doing the “heavy lifting” associated with hauling and pumping gas, as well as delivering fuel to farmers and merchants spread across the county.

To balance this regimen of hard work, the Erwin’s sought to provide their boys with exposure to the fine arts, and especially encouraged their sons to pursue music as a creative outlet and disciplined endeavor.  Jack’s first instrument was an introduction to the strings.  In this regard, it was fortuitous that in the middle-thirties, one Mr. Fred Cahoon, former violin professor at Texas Christian University came to live and teach in the Jacksboro area.  Mr. Cahoon was an accomplished musician, previously a concert master with the Kansa City Symphony, and an active member of the Fort Worth Symphony during his residency in Jacksboro.  Ever the resourceful businessman, Jack’s father promulgated an “oil for music” arrangement with the county’s new maestro, bartering fuel for music lessons for young Jack and his brother.  Jack responded favorably to the instruction, engaging religiously in practice and applying himself to study under the “professor”.  He enjoyed the instrument and considered Cahoon a challenging instructor with high standards.  In these formative days under Mr. Cahoon, young Jack advanced well enough to achieve a modicum of local success with the violin, and he performed frequently as a member of high school and community orchestral groups.  However, by his own admission, he never fully achieved the facility with the instrument that he desired.  In his own view, his dexterity on the strings may have been hampered by the calloused hands and strained fingers that were the hard-earned assets of the local oil business.  Under Cahoon’s tutelage, though, Jack did acquire a lasting appreciation for the violin, a love for its musical qualities, as well as sense of feel and regard for the delicate mechanics of the instrument.

Upon graduation from high school in 1938, Jack Erwin enrolled at The University of Texas at Austin to pursue a degree in architecture.  He was given a try-out to change his major to music.  While giving it his best try  was not selected.  Based on this result, Jack made the determination to curtail his career as performing artist, and devoted himself to his studies at the university.  Without knowing it at the time, however, his pursuit of mastery on the violin in these formative years of his life set the stage for Jack’s later achievements as an accomplished maker of his instrument of choice.  Viewing his career in retrospect, it now seems ironic, that the musical affect and skills which were so deeply inculcated in this young man from Jacksboro, and which would eventually manifest themselves in the production of unusually fine instruments employed by some of the world’s best violinists, he was not allowed to study music.

Yet, even as his opportunities in the performing arts plateaued at the university, Jack concentrated on other modes of artistic expression.  In the architecture department, Jack served as student assistant to Professor Samuel Gideon, the University’s legendary architecture instructor, and a watercolorist of national note.  Gideon was a Harvard graduate who came to Texas in 1913 via the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to serve as The University’s Professor of architectural design and history.  In addition to his professional studies, Gideon was also a graduate of the American School of Fine Arts at Fontainebleau, France and studied art at Columbia University.  At the University of Texas, Gideon taught watercolor painting, one of the essential components of architectural studies of the period, as well as actively painting and exhibiting his works throughout the South and Southwest.  It was to this prominent artist and scholar that Jack Erwin found himself essentially apprenticed during his study in the architecture department at the university, and Gideon proved to be an able instructor and early champion of the young man’s work.

In addition to his relationship with Professor Gideon, Jack also received instruction at the University under Raymond Everett, another major force in the Texas fine arts community of the day.  Like Gideon, Everett was a product of Harvard’s architectural school.  Like Gideon, he was also a well-known artist within the region.  He had arrived at the University of Texas in 1915, after teaching stints at the Pennsylvania State University and The University of Michigan.  At Texas he taught drawing and painting in the School of Architecture.  Jack was enrolled in Everett’s in-door watercolor class, and received high marks for his efforts, with Everett particularly regaling Jack’s fastidious portrayal of a red and yellow kerchief which Everett used as a study for classroom still-life projects.

While exposure to such prominent artists in his University experience certainly must have accelerated his abilities, drawing and watercolor actually always seemed to come pretty naturally for Jack.  From his childhood, he had often engaged his free time by composing and drawing as a form of personal entertainment.  Though primarily self-taught, he had already become a sound draftsman by the time of his graduation from high school, and his proficiency with pencil and brush became well-known within the architecture department.  Given this propensity, Jack found that he enjoyed classroom drawing and painting projects that most of his peers viewed with trepidation.  His critiques were constantly among the most positive rendered by the faculty, and he consistently received highest marks for his classroom undertakings.  This, coupled with an obviously strong work ethic, may have made a positive impression on the aging Gideon and Everett.  In any event, Jack soon found himself accompanying Gideon and others on sketching trips in the area, once going with his mentor on a painting adventure to Mexico.

Jack’s artistic fortunes were further bolstered when, during his junior year in college, he chanced to become a room-mate of a fellow architecture student from Los Angeles, California by the name of Mims J. Jackson.  The two struck-up an immediate friendship.  Like Jack, Mims Jackson appreciated fine music and was an equally accomplished watercolorist.  Jack’s new room-mate brought with him a noteworthy record collection of classical standards, and had previously studied under California watercolorist Millard Sheets.  He graciously shared access to his music collection with Jack, as well as his notes on watercolor theory garnered through his lectures under Sheets.  Through his father, Mims also had access to a college student’s most important trapping-an automobile, and the boys frequently employed this vehicle to transport them to the Austin environs and beyond for “plein aire” painting expeditions.  These sketching trips often included Mims’ father, as well as the venerable Professor Gideon.  In the summer of 1941, between his junior and senior year, Jack was invited by Mims Jackson to his mother’s home in Hollywood, California.  He accepted the invitation, staying over a month and completely absorbing himself in the cultural scene available in the Los Angeles area.  All of this was rather “heady” stuff for a young man from Jacksboro, and in all of this, Jack prospered.  His visit broadened his interest and exposure to classical music and particularly the violin, as well as refining his facility as a watercolorist, where he even began experimenting with abstraction in his renderings.

Later that summer, upon his return home to Texas, Jack encountered yet another icon of early Texas art who immediately recognized his abilities and gave initial state-wide exposure to his early work.  Blanche McVeigh was a well-trained artist, printmaker and teacher in Fort Worth.  She had received instruction at the Art Students League in New York, the Pennsylvania Academy and the Chicago Institute.  She had established an art school in the city in 1931 which ran for many years.  When Jack encountered Ms. McVeigh, however, it was in her capacity as director of the Collins Gallery in Fort Worth.  It happened that on his way back to Austin; Jack left a group of watercolors with the gallery for Ms. McVeigh’s inspection and framing.  McVeigh was so impressed with the young man’s images, that unbeknownst to him, she selected two works, “Crepe Myrtle” and “Barn” for submission into the 1941 Texas General Exhibition.  Through Blanche McVeigh’s encouragement, Jack Erwin’s work was juried into his first group show, and not just any group show at that, but the most prestigious exhibition of Texas artists at the time.  The Texas General Exhibition made an annual circuit through the Dallas, Houston and San Antonio museums.  So impressed was Ms. McVeigh with Jack’s total output that she also arranged for his first “one-man” show, exhibiting his remaining work at the Collins Gallery in Fort Worth.

Jack returned to the University in 1942 during wartime and graduated in 1943, already having received his commission as Ensign in the United States Naval Reserves.  Upon graduation, he was ordered to dry-docking school in San Diego, California where he continued his work with Mims Jackson.  Jack spent his free weeks painting abstract watercolors with Mims, perfecting a non-representational style.  After about a year in San Diego, Jack was shipped out to Guam.  In Guam, the young artist executed a series of watercolors depicting the sights and sounds of the wartime base in the Pacific.  Jack recounts that the “first watercolors were realistic, of the land, tents, tropical conditions of the harbor, dredges, submarines nestled alongside their tender, ships in the harbor at sunset, etc.  When these subjects were realistically recorded, the same objects were used again in abstractions.”  This series of watercolors, executed in the throes of World War II, would later become the subject of Jack’s first museum exhibition upon his return to Dallas.

With his service complete and war at end, Jack returned to Jacksboro for a while, and then on to Dallas to begin a career in architecture.  When local architects discovered his portfolio of watercolors, the news of their discovery was circuitously conveyed to Jerry Bywaters, yet another legendary Texas artist whom Jack crossed paths with in his continued Texas journey.  By the time of their introduction, however, Bywaters was the noteworthy curator of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts.  After inspecting the complete body of work, Bywaters curated an exhibition in 1946 of Jack’s wartime watercolors at the Dallas Museum of Art.  The art critic for The Dallas Morning News reported that “the exhibition represents, as well as any I have ever seen, the painless step from representational painting to abstraction.”

While exhibition at an important regional museum, coupled with strong reviews in the press must have been an exhilarating experience for the budding young artist, Jack determined that his painting should take backstage to his pursuit of career.  He left  Texas, bound for New York, to achieve the requisite “large-firm” architectural experience, returning to Dallas to meet and marry Ella Webster in 1949.  In 1950, he was back for two more years of service during the Korean Conflict, coming home in 1952 to wife Ella and a new baby boy.  In the three-year respite after his DMA exhibition, Jack accommodated family, and military transformations, but his painting had effectively been placed on hold.  Likewise, his post-war career aspirations left little time for his art interests, and as such the first stage of Jack Erwin’s multi-faceted career as artist and artisan came quietly to an end.

Jack became a professional architect.  As with his earlier music and visual art pursuits, he brought to his work a sense of discipline and drive, as well as high standards of quality.  Back in Dallas, after his tour of duty in Korea, he worked as a partner for one of the city’s well-known mid-sized firms for about 10 years, establishing himself sufficiently well to move to a flourishing private practice for the remainder of his career.  His architectural portfolio is concentrated in the Dallas area and includes original design or redesign of several educational facilities such as North Dallas High School; churches and synagogues such as Cochran Chapel and Tiferet Israel Synagogue; industrial facilities such as the Continental Ensco Plant in Garland; commercial projects including the redesign of 300 Safeway Stores and Jack County Hospital.  Jack architectural practice offered not only a sound livelihood that provided well for his growing family, but also gave him a professional outlet over the years to satisfy his artistic expression and fine craftsmanship.  In his long career as an architect, Jack Erwin added another dimension to his stellar body of work, his professional craft reflected in the many North Texas facilities where his functional designs and structural aesthetics emerged from his drawing table to be translated into detailed construction plans.  Jack Erwin architectural projects dot the North Texas geography and all bear his imprimatur of sound construction and fine craftsmanship.

Even as he devoted himself to professional endeavors, Jack and his wife Ella maintained an interest in music and the arts.  It was actually Ella, who quite by happenstance inspired Jack’s lifelong pursuit of violin-making, which turned out to be the next facet of his long and productive artistic career.  Ella’s father had owned a music store in the city and had been an accomplished violinist in his own right, performing at a time with the Dallas Symphony.  To entice their oldest son to begin lessons on the instrument, Ella brought home her father’s violin and Jack obligingly took it to Whittle Music Company for repair and strings.  Upon his return home with the retooled instrument, Ella casually issued the challenge to Jack to consider making a violin.  Jack recalls the incident in this manner:

“Ella said to me, ‘I wish you would make a violin’.  I had done some cabinet-work, but this request was way out for me.  I did not even reply to this request.  I remembered seeing in Popular Mechanics magazine an advertisement which read ‘You Can Make A Stradivarius Violin’.  I bought the book and started from scratch.”

The Ella inspired, John B. Erwin violin #1 was subsequently completed in 1956, and with its completion a passion ensued in Jack such that by 2006, he had completed violin #141.  During the fifty-year course of his violin-making, Jack traveled extensively to the art and cultural centers of both the “old” and new world-Cremona, Paris, London, New York –perfecting his craft by studying master instruments, researching the patterns of master makers such as Stradivarius and Del Gesu, and all the while acquiring the precisionist views and nuanced insights of a fine craftsman and connoisseur.  To subject his work to rigors of professional review, he has competed in violin-making competitions held throughout the United States, as well as Vancouver, British Columbia and Poznan, Poland.  The Erwin violins crafted by Jack have received numerous honors and serious acclaim.  One of his violins was awarded as first prize to the winner of the International Paganini Competitions in 2001, with the winner, Poland’s Mariusz Patyra now employing this particular instrument in his worldwide performances.  In addition, the Moscow Conservatory contains two Erwin violins.  After a lifetime of perfecting instrument design and construction, and collaborating with legendary performers, Jack candidly assesses his skills as violin maker to be less than those of Stradivarius, but expresses hope that “maybe some of my violins will in time compare favorably with those of Guarneri Del Gesu”, a rather remarkable sense of personal standard and accomplishment coming from a full-time working architect with small-town Texas sensibilities.

His work as a master violin maker, accomplished architectural draftsman, as well as his early and successful work as a watercolorist of consequence, would probably have been enough to establish Jack Erwin’s reputation as one of Texas’ most diversely talented artists.  It is perhaps, though, his latter body of work in oils, and his association with Dallas artist Reveau Bassett, that seal his reputation as a renaissance man of Texas persuasion.

In 1969, seventy-two year old Reveau Bassett became Jack Erwin’s newest neighbor, and his most important art mentor.  Bassett was by then a legendary character in Texas art.  In the early twentieth century, he had studied at the Arts Student League of New York and the National Academy of Design and participated as a youth in the storied sketching trips of old Frank Reaugh.  He was also a teacher at the Dallas Art Institute with Olin Travis and served as a museum director in the Texas Panhandle.  In 1969, the year that he moved next door to Jack, Reveau Bassett was acknowledged for his lifetime contributions to the arts by the Texas Senate.  Jack and Reveau developed a close friendship and under Bassett’s tutelage, Jack was inspired to paint again, coming off a 15 year hiatus.  He was soon accompanying the elder artist on sketching trips around the Dallas area.  On their outings, Jack initially offered his renditions in watercolor, with Reveau generating images in oil.  Bassett, ever the teacher, soon convinced Jack to paint in oils, and the two enjoyed endless evenings critiquing the fruits of their labors.  As Reveau’s health began to fail and his own participation in painting trips no longer possible, Jack continued local plein air sketching excursions alone, bringing works back for ardent and critical review by his aging artist friend.  Reveau Bassett died in 1981, and Jack Erwin without his inspired friend, once again relinquished his brush, returning to his on-going passion for violin construction.  Under Bassett’s mentorship, Jack Erwin clearly perfected another medium and found a renewed mode of artistic expression through oil on canvas.  In his output of over 600 paintings, executed over a single decade essentially between 1970 and 1980, Jack Erwin beautifully and meticulously captured the vanishing sights and architectural hallmarks of North Texas for posterity.  In addition to their value as fine art, Jack’s paintings of this period offer historical documentation of transitions in this sector of Texas during the late interior of the twentieth century.  As such it is possible to conceive of these works as a collection that may one day rival Bassett’s old mentor, Frank Reaugh, as a time-sensitive chronicle of the rural remnants in a vanishing section of North Texas.

In his lifetime as artist and artisan, Jack Erwin conducted his work quietly and productively, pursuing excellence with a minimum of fanfare.  He exhibited only modestly and, as he considered himself a working architect and only a “week-end” painter for most of his career, Jack managed to feign most of the trappings of the professional art world.  Art works of fine quality, however, whether exquisite violins or meticulous North Texas landscapes are difficult to suppress, and avid Texas art patrons seem to have a “sixth sense” which guides them to rare and hidden treasures.  The artworks of Jack Erwin were effectively rediscovered during the latter half of the 1990’s, coming to the attention of leading Texas collectors such as Bill Cheek of Dallas, as well as art scholars such as Michael Grauer of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum and James Graham Baker, formerly with Texas A&M University.  In 1999, Jack’s collection of World War II watercolors that comprised the corpus of his 1946 DMA exhibition, were selected by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as official projects of the Save America’s Treasures Project.  These works have been restored and now reside in the permanent collection of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum.  Many of his paintings have now found their way into the state’s most prominent private collections of early Texas art, and it is certain that more will be eagerly collected in the years to come.  Likewise, Jack’s violins have garnered international recognition and broad interest since the presentation of his prize instrument at the 2001 Paganini Competitions. 

Despite his remarkable record of accomplishment, Jack Erwin remains a simple and unassuming gentleman of quiet integrity.  In his half-century or more as a Texas artist and artisan, he has plied the use of his creative energies for the common good.  In all his diverse efforts, whether designing and building new structures, crafting fine instruments or recording the Texas landscape in oils, Jack Erwin has created a strong and meaningful body of work that will continue to grow in critical acclaim, and will continue to add cultural value and pleasure for generations to come.  As an artist, craftsman, architect, Jack Erwin is every bit the modern day Renaissance man, and it is good that we can claim him as a quiet genius of deep Texas persuasion.