If you’re callin’ James Poppitz an ordinary artist, then you don’t know Jack.
Poppitz picked up the nickname Jack as a kid. And when he returned to Colorado, after tramping and camping around the world, he was called Denver Jack and later, 100 Dollar Jack, for the price tag on some of his paintings of his favorite musicians, some of which now sell for $300 in the lobby at Oskar Blues Brewery in Lyons.
“He kind of outgrew the 100 Dollar Jack name,” says Marty Jones, publicity and marketing director for Oskar Blues Brewery in Lyons. “Inflation and all, you know.”
Folk art and fine carpentry have taken Jack from his birthplace, tiny Altenburg in southeastern Missouri, to New York, Memphis, the oil fields of Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, New Zealand, Australia, Thailand, China and several stops out West, including a few totaling nearly 20 years in Colorado.
Jack’s career and life is hand-scrawled on his website, .
In November, Oskar Blues Brewery began selling Jack’s portraits of the microbrewery’s beloved beer cans (Ted Fidy Imperial Stout, Old Chub Scottish Style Ale, Dale’s Pale Ale and Gordon). (In 2002, Oskar Blues became the first microbrewer to can its beer.)
Jack says the union with Oskar Blues, its founder, Dale Katechis, and his mom, Ya Ya, who is the brewery’s office manager, seemed a perfect fit.
“They were right where I was coming from. They were nice people. I like their beer. I’ve done a lot of portraits. Why not do a portrait of a beer can?” says Jack, who shares an Estes Park home with his wife of 11 years, Kristine, and their 4 1/2-year-old daughter Alexandra.
“Birds of a feather, we end up flocking together, you know?”
Jack has a laid-back approach to art. “I’ll make anything for anybody as long as I’m in the mood,” his online come-on offers.
When the mood does strike, Jack will make flags from scraps of wood and painted with poems, lyrics and sayings. Jack has sold thousands of his 22-by-22-inch shadow-box portraits, mostly of blues and soul musicians, from Ray Charles, Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner and Son House. He did many of these portraits for House of Blues, which also commissioned Jack to transform a 2007 Honda Fit into an art car sold to benefit HOB’s charity, which funds community and school arts programs. (A Honda honcho bought the orange car that was outfitted with portraits of “Blues Angels” Ray Charles, B.B. King, Lead Belly, Walter “Furry” Lewis and J.B. Lenoir, with guitarist Sam “Lightnin’ ” Hopkins on the hood.)
“I’ll paint on anything,” says Jack, who sang his daughter a song “about the very things that will make you rich will make you poor” before taking a reporter’s phone call. “The idea of painting on something that’s moving, I liked that. The idea of taking a new technological thing and doing something down-home on it, I liked that too.”
In the basement of the Oskar Blues restaurant, music rocks the house four or five nights a week. Musicians — from genres such as Americana, folk, jazz, country, bluegrass and, of course, the blues — long to play the 100-seat juke joint. Jack’s love of music, particularly blues, makes his partnership with the brewery a match from heaven.
“Jack knows who he is and there’s no B.S. about him,” says Jones. “Like a lot of older blues guys, they’ve paid their dues and been down the road and back a million times and they have the scars to show it. And they do their thing and you can take it or leave it. Jack has that same vibe. His paintings are much like great roots music. It’s very down and dirty, unadorned and very affordable.”
While down-to-earth, Jack turns philosophical when talking about his art and the music he loves.
“Certain things touch you in a way that’s kind of beyond words, so you do other things than words to describe it,” Jack says. “My painting, my simple folk portraits, are kind of the visual equivalent of the blues. It’s a simple American down-home, right-to-the-bone kind of honest expression. And the reason I’ve sold hundreds and hundreds of portraits of musicians, mostly blues musicians, is because people can feel it.”
To find out more about Jack, his art and how to purchase his work, visit . His beer-can art, portraits and other works also are sold at the Oskar Blues Grill & Brew, 303 Main St., Lyons, 303-823-6685 or .
