Do you know Jean-Pierre Roy?

Last week, we sat down with our spring instructor, Jean-Pierre Roy, and asked some questions about his studio practice...

Your work contains not just the elements of the classical realist canon, but elements of science fiction, Hollywood design, and other popular genres. Do you see yourself as an artist who adds these elements to the canon? Are you departing from the canon? Running parallel to the canon? Underneath it? Over it?

JPR:

Great question. My answer has probably evolved significantly over the years. I think in the beginning of my career, I was really, really conscious of what dialogue I wanted to be a part of; I was trying hard to frame my work in the vocabulary of the conversation that I was really interested me the most. My genre background plays a huge role in the kinds of stories that I wanted to depict: science fiction, dystopian, the fantastical... But I was never that interested in the superficial action or aesthetics of them. It's not the lasers and aliens, or the destruction and the fantastical escapes that I was interested in. I loved the premise that genre frameworks state up front: “Whatever comfort you hold to, as to what reality is, will be ignored.”

So much of our contemporary fascination with the canon is its distance. From Bosch to

Warhol, it’s all non-local. We are cut off from participating in it, only experiencing it from far

away. What I want to do is to create a remove from the local context for the viewer in the

paintings that I make here and now. A kind of destabilization of the present tense. “What

would happen if you were here, instead of there.” In that sense I suppose I am slingshot-ing

myself backwards through the canon to gain enough momentum to rocket past it.

It’s infuriating and insane how these images just spring from your imagination. How do they first come to you? How much of a given subject do you work out on the canvas, and how much in your mind’s eye? Do you create from an abstracted image that becomes “realist”?

JPR:

That last sentence says it all — I think of my paintings as abstract systems of marks that build

up into a representational image. When you paint grass, you're not painting green leaves, you're

painting millions of years of geologic time that shaped a rocky surface that, for right now, happens to be covered in a thin layer of green leaves. The subtle changes in rhythm and row of

a field of green describes the entropy of the universe itself, right underneath it. I’m always

trying to describe a non-visible system through its effects on the material world around us.

Clouds describe the wind that comes from the sun and the rotation of the earth. Stones are the crumbs left from rocky planetary fruit that grow from the cosmic soil of a dead star. The

images come last. I start with a love of a system that doesn't have a visual language, and go

from there.

Your work often explores grand, otherworldly themes. How do your personal outlooks—on humanity, the environment, or the future—shape the stories you tell in your art?

JPR:

The world we live in makes it all too easy to have a cynical outlook on things. Rampant greed, ecological stress and violent political discourse are absolutely part of the emotional backdrop of my work. For a long time my paintings sought to pictorialize that dystopian gulf between what our interiority wants and expects from the world we live in, and the world that has emerged from our interaction with it. You could say that the human condition is just that: the proximity or distance between what we think we want and what we actually have. Recent

works have sought to re-hierarchical-ize that sentiment. The truly alien world, from our

perspective, would be the one not where everything is in competition with everything else, but the where everything is harmonized in anti-competitive unity.   

 What’s your classroom philosophy for helping students deal with the specific problems of their work?

JPR:

Most artists have a great intuitive relationship with their work, like following the smell of fresh

bread down the street. You don't know where you're going, but you know there is something worth following. My philosophy is to give students a rich vocabulary for the visual phenomena that they experience so that they can have a higher-order conversation with themselves about what they are seeing and feeling. Intuition got you here, but developing a personal logic is what sets you on a path where your obsessions can be weaponized for great personal growth, success, and meaning.

How do you sustain your practice longterm today as an artist?

JPR:

You hear a lot about “balance” and “self-care” and “sustainability,” all totally necessary and

valid propositions... But as I stated in the last question, it’s your obsessions that motivate you. Listen to them. Give in to them. Own them. They are as much a part of what makes an artist's life sustainable as anything else. The artist’s life can be very, very hard. A nurtured obsession will break down barriers like nothing else.

We can't wait to host JP for Color as Light from May 11th - 17th, 2025 - have you signed up yet?