BISHOP 203

As a teen without train-yards, Bishop203 turned to the concrete canvases of abandoned factories in the industrial heart of Bridgeport Connecticut. With his 203 crew, his work was typified by incorporating characters into his tags and graffiti pieces. When he moved down South, he discovered the sanctuary of an empty quiet freight train track, but soon he left for the tiny artist enclave of Charlottesville, Virginia. Posed with expanding his palette beyond larger-than-life walls for graffiti, he began to experiment with ideas that loomed as large in his mind as the spaces he once wrote on. His relationships were as big in his mind as his former pieces, and he turned to pop art renditions of the women who were the center of his life. This was an outlet in what, for a graffiti artist, was a foreign place. Employing sharp lines and bold colors, he explored their status as an object on a pedestal. Simultaneously, he navigated the depths of his own emotions by creating characters whose hearts were cut out and ideas superimposed in the space surrounding them. Today he still juxtaposes the playful with the painful, using a variety of forms and subjects to ply his representations of the world around him and in him.