Jack Bishop - Go everywhere you wanna go, see everything you wanna see

After getting married a few years ago, I began painting portraits of my wife and I along with our dog in our car. For years we’ve regularly travelled the Trans Canada highway together on trips to visit family, and I’ve been drawing from these memories as inspiration in my paintings. Driving and car culture have been a recurrent subject matter for landscape paintings. I’ve made for many years but these works have taken on a more personal feel and introspective approach. As I was working from memory, I stopped using any photographic references and began painting more intuitively, picking and choosing favourite colours or experimenting with different palettes, and often referencing music I’ve been listening to in the titles of my paintings.

I feel like I’ve created my own little world, where the repeated motif of the 3 of us in the car has become like a jumping off point into colour explorations, moments when abstraction mimics fleeting light or glare from sunshine or headlight beams. Technically, I see the works as materially based explorations of paint; combining the brushstrokes of oil and the flatness of acrylic, and the luminosity of fluorescent and iridescent paint. The layering of different materials together creates simultaneous contrasts which activate the surface. The titles add a pop culture reference which I feel creates a sense of atmosphere, tying the continuity of the paintings together.

These recent paintings are part of a bigger ongoing series I’ve been making since 2020 titled “Road Trip Playlist”, thinking about each painting like it was a track of a personal playlist while coasting down the highway.

-Jack Bishop 2023