“I grew up in southern New Brunswick amidst expanding strip malls of Quispamsis and the sprawl of East Saint John. The commercial retail centres and the 15 minute highway commute between home and town has long served as inspiration for my work. In my paintings, I explore notions of landscape through themes of car-culture, consumerism, and sprawl.

My paintings portray colourful and busy landscapes; they can be romanticized or funny, but also can carry a dark realism. They create juxtapositions of natural and commercial space, and subvert clichéd traditional landscape painting of a idealized untouched Canadian environment, iconized in such paintings as Tom Thomson and the Group of Seven. The compositions map out a geography of anonymity, a sort of nowhere typical of the outskirts of large North American cities. The spaces are deceiving, and perspective is often skewed. The paintings become their own fabricated environments; where placement of advertising, roads and infrastructure break up otherwise picturesque scenery,” Jack Bishop.

In this video by filmmaker Matthew Brown with help from Zoë Boyd, you’ll meet Bishop as he explores and documents the urban outskirts of Halifax. Back at his studio, you get a first hand look at his unique process of collaging photographs together and building the paintings.

Video courtesy of CBC Arts.