en-ca SC0312-SJO1-PA-1

en-ca Newnham - Building B - Level 3 - Front of stairwell (North Wall)

en-ca Joe Sleep (1914-1978)

en-ca Whales and Boat

en-ca c. 1977

en-ca Painting

en-ca Latex

en-ca Marker

en-ca Spray Paint

en-ca 67.3 x 108 cm

en-ca "My cat is my best seller."

en-ca “(Sleep’s) images offer a coherent life view of a kind of ‘peaceable kingdom’, a good-natured world in which the elements co-exist in a perpetual tranquility.” (Bruce Ferguson)

"Originally introduced to art through colouring books given to him by nurses in the hospital, Joe Sleep gradually developed an inventory of stenciled images which could be reused to create simple and complex picture patterns. Joe Sleep would trace images from colouring books, magazines, or book illustrations per se, sometimes enlarging the size by a simple system of scaling and then he would make a hard cardboard stencil which could be used indefinitely. The inventory was revised and expanded according to customer demands and Joe Sleep’s own interest in significant images from his memory. Even his few human figures which especially look hand-drawn are stenciled images, as is the case with the greatest majority of his works.

Joe was full of paradoxes. At one minute he would be the convalescent saying his painting ”helps to pass the time”; at the next, the entrepreneur promoting his product, and the next, the artist making decisions about pictorial problems. His life was full of hard work, hard times, little money, bouts with alcohol and poor health, yet his paintings were joyful representation of flowers, fish, birds, animals, boats, and buildings. Joe lived on the fringes of society, yet unknowingly contributed to the visual heritage of the province. He could be a gentle old man who loved children, or a derelict wino, obnoxious and crude. He could be childlike and dependent, or worldly-wise and philosophical. He could tell a story about how he worked with elephants on the Bill Lynch shows (could it really have been for thirty-two years?) and shortly after wonder what colour to paint an elephant’s eye because he had never seen one.

In spite of, or more likely because of these contradictions and paradoxes, Joe was much more than a colourful illiterate street character. He was a friend to have a beer with, to paint a house with, and the father I never got close enough to before it was too late. There was a depth not always fathomable. He was a person with his own strengths, weaknesses, joys, fears, doubts and hopes. His painting gave him pleasure, a means of expression, and most important it gave him dignity.

Well, I’m not sorry about it. I enjoyed every bit of it, and if weren’t for Ken and Harold, I’d still be down on Kent street paintin’ the shit-house door or something.”

en-ca Shad Fly Guy

en-ca Purchased at auction from Waddington's on March 16, 2017.

en-ca Signed right of the middle before painted border, Joseph Sleep

Seneca Art