Painting by Other Means

Painter James Bishop has died at age 93. His lyrical abstractions juxtapose fields of color, or expanses of primed and painted canvas. He often worked on found materials, displaying a careful attention to his substrate’s surface. In an essay for our October 2008 issue, artist and critic Joe Fyfe responded to a retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago that centered Bishop’s work on paper. “Bishop’s paintings on paper arise from a carefully determined process and an op