Jack L. Gray

Jack's evident lack of interest in Lismer's classroom sessions soon led to private discussions between the two artists, which proved fruitful.

In those years Gray also spent several seasons at sea with the last of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia's dory-fishing schooner fleet, and amassed a portfolio of sketches, notes and photographs.

When the steamship Dufferin Bell was wrecked on the Nova Scotian coast in 1951, Gray traveled with the salvage crew and filled several sketchbooks, attracting the attention of the press.

For one of his sketches, Gray obtained permission from authorities in Brooklyn Navy Yard to use the deck of the rusting decommissioned aircraft carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6).

He was represented by Rudolf Wunderlich's Kennedy Galleries on 57th Street while living in the city, and briefly occupied one of the Des Artistes flats in the Upper West Side.

In 1958 an engagement with Samuel Bronston's Hollywood production company took Gray to Spain, where he worked on posters for the film John Paul Jones.

The Maine studio was short-lived, as Gray sold it in 1961 and moved to the Marlborough Woods area in the south end of Halifax, purchasing a property on the Northwest Arm, with a dock for his boat.

Gammon and Peed had leaked information about the gift to the press, and upon publication of the White House visit news, bids from many patrons and galleries rapidly ensued.

Concurrently, Gray maintained a summer hideaway in Stonehurst, Nova Scotia, where he continued to sketch his favorite subject, inshore fishermen in small boats.

In his adult years Gray was known as a witty raconteur and motorboat skipper, and in the latter part of his life often sailed across the Gulf Stream to the Bahamas.

He was a frequent visitor to the Blue Bee Bar in New Plymouth, Green Turtle Cay and was a personal friend to (proprietor) Miss Emily Cooper.

In the early 1960s, with help from the Oland family's business connections in Halifax, Gray's paintings Off Gunning Point and The Fisherman were released as poster-sized reproductions.

In the 1970s Gray himself decided to take control of his reproductions, and was led to overseas high-quality printing professionals through his friendship with H. Dieter Holterbosch and Egon Hansfstangl.

The vast majority of these impromptu drawings were discarded by restaurant staff, but a few salient examples survive, notably in the hands of the management of Testa's of Palm Beach, Florida.

1950) floating studios was a Royal Canadian Navy harbor launch, which had been sold to fishermen post-war, and when Gray acquired this boat the Kathleen R. H. he made extensive modifications to the vessel.

The artist's early sketchbooks, originally kept in chronological order, were separated by a Halifax dealer in the 1960s, and sold as individually framed drawings.

With encouragement from both public museums and privately operated art galleries, a considerable revival of interest in Gray's life and work was seen to be underway after 2001.