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Do You Know Jack? Help Us Find The Artist Who Drew and Lost This Painting

By Mark Konkol | September 28, 2015 5:30am
 A paper scroll found in Hyde Park contained the drawings of Jack, a young artist with a wonderful imagination. Swirls of color depict warring tornadoes.
A paper scroll found in Hyde Park contained the drawings of Jack, a young artist with a wonderful imagination. Swirls of color depict warring tornadoes.
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DNAinfo/ Mark Konkol

HYDE PARK — The scroll was just laying in the dirt, dead center of the single-track trail that cuts through the grassy park near 57th Street across the street from the Museum of Science and Industry, when I spotted it on the last leg of my morning hike.

The small piece of masking tape that struggled to keep the paper from unfurling had a name written on it in block letters. "JACK," it read.

After I scooped it up and relieved the tape of its burden, the scroll unfurled to reveal a priceless piece of art. In that moment, I felt as good as I did that time my buddy from Detroit found 20 bucks on the street behind The Matchbox and used it to pay our bar tab.

The abstract painting — a collection of colorful swirling figures in shades of red, orange, brown, teal and zucchini green, each one distinctly different in texture, size and shape that seemed to be at odds with each other on the blank white paper — included messages handwritten in pencil.

An oblong red sphere, which from a certain angle appeared to be a smiling Buddha or Miss Piggy or Jabba the Hut — I can’t be sure, abstract art can be tricky to interpret — that appeared to have been carved in paint by a cherub’s chubby fingers, was marked “a head.”

Below the head, a tight but misshapen fire-engine-red circle covered part of what appeared to be a warning: “… tornado is going to break the orange tornado.”

From a certain angle, it appears that threatening tornado is destined to level the orange sphere hugging the corner of the scroll marked with a caption, “Orange tornado exploding.” The swirl of green on the paper's left edge is also a "tornado" that "is going to get the white tornado."

I snapped a photo of the cherub-finger painting and sent it along to my pal Tony Fitzpatrick, an artist who got his start drawing violent, age-inappropriate action-scenes in notebooks that got him suspended from school when the nuns got a look at them.

 The paper scroll found on a single-track path in Hyde Park unfurled to reveal a priceless work of art and good vibes on the first day of autumn.
The paper scroll found on a single-track path in Hyde Park unfurled to reveal a priceless work of art and good vibes on the first day of autumn.
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DNAinfo/Mark Konkol

Fitzpatrick would know if the found work of Jack the Artist might be the early work of a boy genius, or the next Vincent Van Gogh, and be valuable some day.

“Tony, do you think this mysterious artist Jack could be 20 years away from cutting off his ear?” I asked.

“Nah, he’s not going to cut off his ear. But you can tell he has a wonderful imagination,” Fitzpatrick said. “My money is on the orange tornado. He’s telling a whole story in addition to drawing. The narrative and picture work together. I did that as a kid.”

And now you can buy some of Fitzpatrick’s most sought after work for the price of a small South Side cottage.

I’m no art expert but I’m smart enough to know Jack the Artist’s scroll was a pretty special find on the first day of autumn.

You can’t put a price on that. Fitzpatrick agreed.

“Every once in a while you find a little gem of art you don’t expect to move you, and oddly enough it does, no matter who the artist is,” he said. “It’s wonderful when that happens.”

Indeed, it is.

And as wonderful as it was to find the lost scroll, I'm hoping someone might help me return it to Jack the Artist, a boy who paints exploding orange tornados with his tiny fingers. It's probably even more special to Jack's mom and dad, whoever they might be.

In the meantime, I’ll gladly hang on to the painting; maybe stick it to the refrigerator door.

A finger-paint reminder of how delightful it feels to find treasure.

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