Rethink Remembers: Jack

Here are some things you should know about Jack...

He was part of our extended American family who lived in a unique and beautiful place known as Mount Washington on the outskirts of Los Angeles, he was our great-nephew and much loved and admired.

The following words were written by a local friend of his parents.

He was tall and thin. His hair was messy. If there was a pen nearby, he took it apart. He was brilliant – always the smartest kid in the room. He was quirky and creative, making drawings and paintings and sculptures as well as wonderfully ideosyncratic videos with his friends Zoe, Katie and Frankie. He was fiercely independent. He broke his arm at college one summer and didn’t think to tell his family for weeks.

He loved Mount Washington passionately. He went to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY, on a generous partial scholarship but always intended to come back to Los Angeles, and to Mount Washington specifically, where he planned to spend the rest of his life.

It was at Mount Washington Elementary that he recited the Gettysburg Address at talent shows in the first and second grade. It was in Mount Washington that, starting in fifth grade, he and his friends Alec, Ben, Rob and Zack dug a hole that was so big it was visible, they proudly told everyone, on Google Earth.

It was in Mount Washington that he and his friends created an enormous tree house one summer, adding touches like potpourri in the faux “bathroom.” It was in Mount Washington, in the summer of 2010, that Jack and an anonymous group of fellow artists created huge, 10-foot-tall paintings that they attached with wheat paste in the middle of the night to the concrete hill reinforcements along Mount Washington Drive. Most of the neighbors loved the colorful “guerilla” art, which received a special mention in the L.A. Eastsider, but someone complained about the paintings, which mysteriously disappeared.

Here are two more things about Jack:

Jack had been having hallucinations since middle school but told no one. He endured the visions through high school – he was on the North Hollywood High School Academic Decathlon team – and through three years of college at Sarah Lawrence. Despite his condition, Jack continued to create. He contributed to and helped edit the Visual Art Review at Sarah Lawrence. His work appeared in Taffy Hips Magazine. His video Embrace the Moment was accepted to the Sarah Lawrence Film Festival. He secured an impressive internship with a prominent New York artist in the summer of 2010.

Jack’s condition worsened and he was unable to complete the internship. He came home to Mount Washington and finally told his family what he was going through. Jack was determined to graduate from Sarah Lawrence and tried to go back to school in the fall of 2010, but his mental illness made it impossible.