Forward by Art Critic John Russell Taylor
The colours flow or pool, merge or battle shrink back or push forward, flare or chill. Clearly there is an element of chance, but also a strong controlling mind that takes over when the hand relinquishes control. John Bischoff’s paintings resemble those of Jackson Pollock, not at all in the way they look, but in the way they are The made, nature on a loose rein but always shaped by art
Bischoff has always inclined towards abstraction, but this latest phase has less to do with abstracting something (usually landscape in British art ) and more to do with the physics of matter. He uses an enormous variety of painting materials in his work, frequently materials that are supposed to be mutually exclusive. He is deeply, artistically interested in what happens when you lay one kind of paint over another, dilute with various kinds of oil, water, egg white, vinegar, and then set them to fight it out or make some edgy peace on canvas. Anyone who sets out to interpret the paintings in terms of what lies (or might lie) behind the scene is in for a frustrating time.The point of these imposing canvases is that what you see is what you get: there is nothing perceptible beyond the scene.The scene itself is the significance.
Of course it is possible to see these paintings as, for example, visions of outer space or the depths of ocean, or the eruptions of molten lava from a volcano. But that is entirely in the viewers’ mind: if you suggest such things to the artist, he will neither confirm or deny, not because he wants to deliberately mystify, but because he can comment with no more certainty that any of his interrogator. Harold Pinter once told me that he had received a communication from someone who claimed he had just seen the true interpretation of The Caretaker. According to him this was that the three characters were God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, the shed Aston is building in the garden is Christ’s church on earth, and so on, so what did Harold think of that “I can say only that was not what I consciously had in mind, but who am I to say wether its true or not? The play exists equally in the mind of the writer, the work of the actor, and the eye and mind of the beholder”.
So it is with Bischoff’s paintings: their resistance to definitive interpretation is a large part of theIr power. The rest lies in their sheer delight they offer. Forget about art just wallow in their visual slender. That is already, as Blake remarked,“Enough or too much“.
The colours flow or pool, merge or battle shrink back or push forward, flare or chill. Clearly there is an element of chance, but also a strong controlling mind that takes over when the hand relinquishes control. John Bischoff’s paintings resemble those of Jackson Pollock, not at all in the way they look, but in the way they are The made, nature on a loose rein but always shaped by art
Bischoff has always inclined towards abstraction, but this latest phase has less to do with abstracting something (usually landscape in British art ) and more to do with the physics of matter. He uses an enormous variety of painting materials in his work, frequently materials that are supposed to be mutually exclusive. He is deeply, artistically interested in what happens when you lay one kind of paint over another, dilute with various kinds of oil, water, egg white, vinegar, and then set them to fight it out or make some edgy peace on canvas. Anyone who sets out to interpret the paintings in terms of what lies (or might lie) behind the scene is in for a frustrating time.The point of these imposing canvases is that what you see is what you get: there is nothing perceptible beyond the scene.The scene itself is the significance.
Of course it is possible to see these paintings as, for example, visions of outer space or the depths of ocean, or the eruptions of molten lava from a volcano. But that is entirely in the viewers’ mind: if you suggest such things to the artist, he will neither confirm or deny, not because he wants to deliberately mystify, but because he can comment with no more certainty that any of his interrogator. Harold Pinter once told me that he had received a communication from someone who claimed he had just seen the true interpretation of The Caretaker. According to him this was that the three characters were God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, the shed Aston is building in the garden is Christ’s church on earth, and so on, so what did Harold think of that “I can say only that was not what I consciously had in mind, but who am I to say wether its true or not? The play exists equally in the mind of the writer, the work of the actor, and the eye and mind of the beholder”.
So it is with Bischoff’s paintings: their resistance to definitive interpretation is a large part of theIr power. The rest lies in their sheer delight they offer. Forget about art just wallow in their visual slender. That is already, as Blake remarked,“Enough or too much“.
