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| artists:
Natalia Makievska Nelson Wong
archives 07-08:
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JON HISCOCK
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Jon Hiscock is an independent artist, born in Grand Falls Newfoundland, and raised in and around the Greater Toronto Area. His first commission, at the age of fourteen, came from the Central Eglinton Children’s Centre, for a full classroom mural, which took an entire year to complete, and unfortunately was destroyed in 1997 when the school was torn down. Enrolling in Ceramics, photography, life drawing, illustration, welding and every other art program offered throughout the three high schools Jon attended during his youth, gave him an extensive artistic knowledge and an ambivalent attitude toward attending post secondary education. Now, at the age of thirty, Jon is hoping to escape the city life to open an artist retreat in Prince Edward County with his life long partner Janna Burford. |
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Sadie
MaeGlutz
The Good
Doctor.....
"It never got
weird enough for me." Hunter S. Thomson
18 x 36
sold
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Jon about his work:
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JON'S ROOM I find it hard to describe, elusive, even though it's one of my favourite places to be. Maybe because it's one of my favourite places to be. It rides free of summary, free of anything but a changing set of sharp specifics. The small orange chair I always sit in. Music in promiscuous genres tumbling from vinyl records: punk, country, rock, jazz...even Leadbelly mumbling made-up (or remembered, or both) songs non-stop in his kitchen, recorded by Pete Seeger. Then Joan Jett. Jon calls his room "the artistic expression of a teenager's bedroom." Then, dissatisfied with that, "recreating a youth that I did have but didn't have." Mostly he calls it "my room." Maybe for him, too, it is a place that floats free of labels. I once sat in Jon's room two or three nights a week, several hours a night, for five weeks in a row, watching Jon paint. It was one of the best five weeks I've spent. I wrote an article about the experience, but that was just a handy excuse. Each time I left, walking out into the deserted winter street at 2 or 3 a.m., I felt a little lighter and a little stranger. As if, perhaps, someone had injected little gusts of air, turbulent eddies, between my thoughts. Or rotated my head slightly on my neck so that I viewed the world from a less assured, more alert angle. I felt better. Calmed down and jagged-up, both. The paintings I had seen, finished or in process, furnished my mind with a strange mixture of anonymity and skewed fame. The "Wood Panels" might have been cut from the walls of a thousand basements I've been in. Except that these were recreations on canvas, meticulous and unique, that recreated rather than copied their ubiquitous source. Finally, I could see wood panels again. No small gift. Hunter Thompson, "The Good Doctor", not trapped with his props of guns and drugs and loud-mouthed TROUBLE, but quiet and serene, lost in the contemplative spheres of the almost-monastic thinker he worked so hard to deny. Sadie May Glutz. A good girl, blandly pretty. Hardly recognizable as, in her operator's phrase, "one of your children that come at you with knives." Jon paints on discarded canvas, he seeks it out, the piece that is unsellable because of a tear or rip somewhere in it. He stitches up the blemish and paints right over it, but never forgets where it is. I once asked him if he could paint on a pristine surface. His answer was a wordless look of horror. That might tell you more about his room than anything I've said yet. What is a painter's room anyway? In one sense it is everywhere. Anywhere he takes his eye and his hand, the slanted light or shade he stands in to view the world. In another sense it can only be where he actually paints, where he brushes, drips, sprays, smears, rubs pigments onto canvas. "Backgrounds are hard," Jon says, often, about painting. As I hear it, it is a complaint and a motto. A goal, even. "Backgrounds are hard," he insists. And yet, as he says it, his room is the perfect–the only possible–background for his painting.
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