Artist Loses Life’s Work With Theft of His Van : Crime: Vista painter John Jennings, known for his marine-life murals, is offering a reward for the return of several hundred lithographs and slides.

John Jennings is an artist without art.

Last weekend, he said, several hundred lithographs and slides of the environmental marine paintings and mammoth murals he has sold and donated worldwide were stolen, along with his battered 5-year-old van, from the parking lot of a San Diego hotel.

And now the distraught artist, who says he has no other record of his work, is offering a reward for its return.

The most frustrating aspect of the theft, he says, is that he has no way of knowing if the thieves were after the lithographs or if they stole the van without knowing the works were inside.

In any event, Jennings says the contents of the van, which he fears may have been tossed in some trash receptacle, were priceless.

“This is it--it was all there,” the Vista resident said Monday. “For the thieves, those works might not have had any value at all. But for me--I just can’t put a price on them. They were my aspirations and my dreams.”

Recently, the Vietnam veteran announced he was granting an unusual gift to the city of Oceanside as a welcome-home gesture to returned Gulf War veterans: a 16-by-45-foot mural of the coastal city showing his signature images of dolphins and whales swimming.

The mural is to be similar to other works of art Jennings has created--the paintings and lithographs that adorn public streets and galleries elsewhere, including Cannery Row on Monterey Bay.

Now Jennings, who says he has gotten little sleep since the theft, says the start of the local mural may be delayed.

“I mean, I could start it, but right now my heart just isn’t in it,” he said. “It’s going to be a matter of picking up the pieces.”

Ironically, Jennings said, the night the works were stolen was to have been one of the most important of his life. He and his wife, Sandee, had gone to the Holiday Inn on Aero Drive in Kearny Mesa to attend a writers conference and meet with two Hollywood screenwriters, who are planning a movie of his life and art, he said.

Thirty-five years ago, when Jennings was a small boy, a sadistic headmaster at a military school he attended in Washington state confined him to a box for nearly five months. The master was later prosecuted for his treatment of the youngsters in his charge.

Jennings, meanwhile, grew up with a lust for the freedom of wide-open spaces, a passion he applies to his sweeping mural scenes.

“It was to be an important night,” said Jennings, who also showed several slides at the conference. “The screenwriters needed to see the work. I had taken my complete portfolio with me, my whole life’s work.”

Inside the van, he said, were 230 lithographs, along with numerous prints and watercolors. Perhaps more important, he said, was a briefcase containing at least 60 transparencies of original artwork Jennings used to create greeting cards and calendars in a business run from his home.

“That’s it--I’m out of business for the next year,” he said of the loss of the slides.

Jennings’ vehicle is a white 1986 Toyota van with Oregon license plates. It has a smashed driver’s-side front parking light and a hole in the passenger-side rear tail light.

“I’ve asked myself this a million times since the theft,” Jennings said. “It was a dirty van. Why did they pick my van out of the crowd? I thought they might have had better security on the premises.”

Chris Luce, the hotel manager on duty, said he had been informed of the van’s theft but had not heard about the artwork inside.

“The only thing I can say is that, if you’ve got thousands of dollars worth of anything in your car, I wouldn’t leave it anywhere, let alone in a deserted parking lot,” he said. “You’ve got something of extreme sentimental or monetary value, take it inside the hotel with you.”

Jennings said he has reported the theft to San Diego police and has spent the past several days combing a 10-mile-radius around the hotel, as well as other areas of San Diego, in search of his van and artwork.

Despite the fact that he was uninsured, he has offered a $15,000 reward for the artworks’ return--$14,000 in artwork and $1,000 in cash--and asks that anyone with information call Crime Stoppers at 235-TIPS or San Diego police at 531-2000.

“These people have taken something that doesn’t belong to them,” Jennings said. “How could they have any self-esteem, any self-worth, to take something that means so much to another person?

“Some of those pieces represented more than five years of work,” he said. “It’s a feeling of being raped, like being violated. Those works represented the spiritual part of who I am. And now they’re gone.”