University of Denver

August 28, 2006— Jack Suzuki (BA liberal arts ’47) is making a colorful splash at the University of Colorado at Denver’s Auraria Library. More than 40 of his kaleidoscopic abstract paintings hang on the library walls and he’s constantly adding to the display.
The 92-year-old artist first picked up a paintbrush 15 years ago when, to assuage his grief after his wife died, he took a painting class through DU’s senior-citizen audit program.

Now he paints every day, and he continues taking art classes at CU–Denver’s College of Arts and Media, where he is known by faculty, students and staff as “Grandpa Suzuki.”

“When people look at my abstracts,” Suzuki says, “they stand there and look this way and that, and try to make something of it. They see something in them.”

This article originally appeared in The University of Denver Magazine, Fall 2006.