Jack Ogden

By Tim Foster, Midtown Monthly

"Double B", oil on canvas, 2010

Longtime Sac State art professor Jack Ogden has been putting his retirement to good use – he had a show at CCAS not long ago and just appeared in Flatlanders III over at the Nelson a few months back. Here he presents a show of oils on both wood and canvas. Ironically,last month’s feature on emerging artist Mathew Zefeldt noted Zefeldt’s recent fascination with artist Phil Guston, and this month we have an artist with fifty years of painting under his belt also exhibiting a strong Guston flavor. Where Zefeldt has only recently begun taking inspiration from Guston, Ogden has been under that artist’s spell for many years- so much so that the Guston influence has become a core component of Ogden’s work. Ogden’s most recent paintings have gotten looser and almost evince an outsider feel. Rough-hewn figures that evoke mid-twentieth century archetypes populate the work here: a group of working class laborers peer at the viewer; a zoot suit-wearing man who might be a gangster – or a movie star – smokes his cigarette. Ogden appears to be revisiting the days of his youth, bringing back painted snapshots of misty memory.