Taking shapes

Painter Jude Bischoff once carried a 3-by-4-foot canvas for miles along the Lake Tahoe Flume Trail to reach a site where he wanted to paint.

“I carried it five miles, and that’s a real chore—just to get to the site,” he said. “And then a peregrine falcon actually landed on the rock near me while I was working on the painting, and I got photos of it and then put that in the painting.”

Bischoff, who grew up in Ohio and attended Bowling Green State University, has been painting scenes of the Sierra for decades. He moved to California in the ’80s after receiving an art degree but worked in real estate while raising his family.

“I stopped painting for about 10 years and didn’t start again until 1995,” he said. “Life has changes to it. You’ve got to adapt—and when you have a family, that’s the priority.”

About 10 years ago, with his children grown and the housing crisis at its height, Bischoff left real estate to paint full-time and settled near Grass Valley, California. Today, he makes his living selling renderings of natural scenes done in bright, thickly textured oil paints. Dynamic, repeating shapes in the details of leaves or riffles of water create a sense of measured movement in Bischoff’s paintings—distracting, at least temporarily, from the large animal silhouettes within which entire landscape scenes are often painted.

“What I do is start with the shape of the bear—or whatever I’m painting—and then I go out into nature and just start painting and putting in the landscape and capturing the energy and rhythm of where I am,” Bischoff said. “I repeat shapes; I paint in every leaf and every pine needle, and as I repeat those shapes, it sets up the rhythm of the piece—the same kind of rhythm you find in music or nature.”

When a painting is done, Bischoff said, “that rhythm emanates off the piece and spreads that love into the environment.”

Many of his animal subjects are the ones he encounters in the wild.

“It’s a lot of bears,” he said. “In fact, when we pulled into our front yard the other day, there was a bear. Of course, they don’t stick around long to pose.”

Bischoff sometimes also meets his patrons out in the wild—people who enjoy the same vistas and wildlife that draw him to the Sierra to paint. That’s how he met art collector and RN&R contributor Terra Breeden.

“We were camping at Buckeye Hot Springs,” Bischoff said. “I walked by her and her boyfriend with a canvas. She saw there was a bear drawn on it. She thought I was going to target shoot at it. Then she saw it was a painting, and she got really excited—and so we became friends right then.”

When winter sets in, Bischoff will turn his attention to another project he’s working on, a series of paintings called “Flow.”

“I’m laying paintings on the ground and pouring acrylics on them and getting a really interesting background developed before putting in animals,” he said.

Work on the series will carry him through the winter months, allowing him to work indoors. But once the snows melt again, he’ll be back to capturing scenes out in nature.

“I’ve been out here since ’82—but one day I was on the Flume Trail, and I just got all teared up,” Bischoff said. “If I had never left Ohio, I’d have never seen this. And it’s just so spectacular.”