Jack Bishop
Jack Bishop was born in Saint John, New Brunswick and currently lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from NSCAD University in 2007. He is a three time recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Creation Grant, including most recently in 2021, which supported his body of work Road Trip Playlist. He has exhibited nationally across Canada and been collected by many private collections.
Bishop’s paintings have featured the recurrent subject matter of driving for some time now, but his current body of work has additionally become autobiographical. They are – in a sense – family portraits of Bishop, his wife, and their dog in the car, and are repeated motifs of what matters most to Bishop. Inspired by years of regularly travelling the highway back and forth between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, the openness of the highway and it’s segments of scabby foliage has become the mise-en-scene for these works. Bishop states “I have always like the idea of a painting not being defined by a specific place, in the way it could be ‘anywhere’.”
Additional inspiration is taken from Bishop’s love of music. Artworks are titled using appropriated song lyrics, creating a pop culture reference which frames the paintings into a conceptual narrative: giving a level of atmosphere to the work and inclusivity to the viewer. Speaking on this Bishop explains “I like to think about the paintings like tracks of music from a personal playlist you would listen to while coasting down the highway on the road trip”.
The introspective subject matter of Bishop’s artwork is met with materially based explorations of paint and colour theory. Using florescent and iridescent paint, the surface becomes activated, where colour becomes transcendent, carving light and space into abstraction.
Jack Bishop was born in Saint John, New Brunswick and currently lives and works in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts from NSCAD University in 2007. He is a three time recipient of the Canada Council for the Arts Creation Grant, including most recently in 2021, which supported his body of work Road Trip Playlist. He has exhibited nationally across Canada and been collected by many private collections.
