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CHALKER, Jack Bridger, ARCA, RBA, RWA, ASIA, Hon FMAA. |
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Jack Chalker was born on the 10th. October, 1918. He studied art at Goldsmiths’ from 1936 to 1939. With the outbreak of war he was called up becoming a gunner in the Royal Artillery. In 1942 he was captured during the fall of Singapore. He spent the next three years as a Japanese prisoner of war in Singapore and in the Thailand-Burma Railway camps. During this time, in furtive secrecy, he made diary notes, sketches and paintings recording life and conditions around him, using whatever materials he could scrounge. He also worked beside the renowned Australian surgeon “Weary” Dunlop, a fellow prisoner, documenting the ravages of disease, wounds and starvation as well as ingenious medical equipment fabricated in the camps. Many of his sketches are now at the Imperial War Museum in London. After the war he continued his studies at the Royal College of Art. Later he came to Bristol and became the Principal of the West of England College of Art. In 1959 he became an Artist Member of the Bristol Savages. A painter and book illustrator, he continued his work as a surgical and medical illustrator eventually being elected a Fellow of the Society of Medical Artists of Great Britain. It was in this capacity, as a surgical illustrator, that he worked with Bro. Sav. Bob Horton, then Consultant Surgeon at Bristol. He exhibited at the Bristol Savage Annual Exhibitions in the early sixties, and also at the RBA, RWA, and RP. He also had one-man shows at the Dixon Gallery London, and the RWA. He now lives near Wells in Somerset. (R.S.B)
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