Jorge Fick - Artists - Eric Firestone Gallery

B. DETROIT, MICHIGAN, 1932
D. SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO, 2004

Jorge Fick grew up in Detroit and first attended art school in Guadalajara, Mexico. He changed his first name from George to Jorge in homage to Latin culture he adored. After graduating from Black Mountain College in 1955, Fick moved to New York, where he worked with Franz Kline and was introduced to the Abstract Expressionism of Jackson Pollock,Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. In the late 1950s, Fick traveled to San Francisco, where, through his friend, the poet Robert Creeley, he absorbed the culture and rhythms of the Beat Poets. Fick was also an outstanding colorist, a skill he honed doing dye transfers for the environmental photographer, Eliot Porter, and as a color consultant to the renowned designer, Alexander Girard, with whom he collaborated on his famed project for Braniff Airlines.

Eventually, Fick settled in the high desert of New Mexico and shared a studio with John Chamberlain. There he began to integrate his artistic influences with symbols of the Pueblo Indians to create a new visual syntax. His finest works, The Pod Paintings, are semi-abstract symbols that blend abstraction, cartoons and pop art.