James Wyper was born in 1971 in the Canadian mountain town of Kimberley, BC, and was raised on the Saskatchewan prairies. His ongoing series of geometric paintings were initially inspired by aerial views of the vast Canadian landscape.
Wyper’s current theme of inquiry is the nature of consciousness and the practice of present-moment-awareness. He says, “Painting is the process of grounding consciousness into an object. Paintings perfectly reflect the acts and states-of-being of their makers, but they also act as mirrors to their viewers. Reality is reflective of consciousness, so if you find yourself in front of a painting that moves you, realize that you’re you’re looking at an aspect of yourself, and that your consciousness is creating your own unique version of that painting.”
Wyper drafts geometries by hand or as them laser-cut into birch, and then paints them in acrylic with a palette knife, creating rough imperfections over ordered shapes. With their rich color and sometimes mandala-like geometry, his paintings have been described as “doorways of luminescence and vibration.”
A self-taught painter with more than a decade of experience as a working artist, Wyper once lived in an old school bus and painted while living on the road. Today he maintains a studio on an island in British Columbia, and makes paintings which are collected around the world.
