Kenneth Jack MBE AM RWS was an Australian Watercolour artist who specialised in painting the images of an almost forgotten outback life: old mine workings, abandoned ghost towns, decaying farm buildings. The land he evoked in his pictures, which he often depicted in the magical light just before nightfall, was an Australia of ghost towns, abandoned mine workings, ruined shacks and barns, recorded as they were about to return to the landscape where they had been been both constructed and deserted almost within living memory. It became Jack's life's work to record this world before its destruction. "I think he must know Australia better than anyone," the critic Lou Klepac wrote.

In 1956 Jack was appointed Senior Instructor of Art at the Caulfield Institute of Technology, where he founded both a printmaking and a painting department. He also served as an assistant to the Art Inspector of the Technical Schools. Some of his most abstract work - his restrained, organised images included a series of studies of paddle steamers - was done as a printmaker and two linocuts submitted to the Giles Bequest Print Competition at the Victoria and Albert Museum were purchased by the museum. However, he found the contemporary trend towards abstract expressionism as fundamentally antithetical to his own creative work, and he became intolerant of painting not based on solid training.

He became a professional painter at the age of 39 after giving up his job at the Caulfield Institute of Technology.

In 1977 he was elected to The Royal Watercolour Society and in 1982 was awarded the MBE, and the Order of Australia (AM) followed in 1987.

Kenneth Jack's works can be found in these collections:

Royal Collection at Windsor
Victoria and Albert Museum
National Gallery of Australia
The Australian War Memorial
The capital city collections of every Australian state.