Drawings 1996-2023

Drawing Notes

Last year, I received a grant from the New Brunswick Arts Board to digitally archive selected drawings that were created between 1996-2023. The process of archiving the hundreds of drawings led to the idea for this exhibition. This will be the first time exhibiting these works which make up a large part of the private process that happens in the development of bodies of work.

My drawing practice exists adjacent to my painting practice and is primarily a tool for idea formulation. The purpose of each drawing changes depending on which series of paintings they are preceding. For series such as Mural Studies, Neutralizer Suite, Log Pile Variations and Pitch Assembling, the drawings act as preliminary studies that are later developed into larger scale paintings. Since my 2016 series High Gloss Ceilings, my approach to painting shifted from process-based to one of intentional graphics, hence the use of preliminary studies that are later used as templates for paintings. Between 2008 and 2016, no drawings exist of any substance because all “drawing” was done directly on the painting surface, indicative of the approach I used for painting at the time.

The drawings also act as a personal memory archive, documents of moments or locations that the drawings were created in.

Drawings from 2018 are finished works, with a selection of them being the content for the book Like a Baby I Was Born Again, published by Swimmers Group. The works are personal and are simultaneously critical and self reflective, referencing and upending historical political cartooning.

The preliminary drawings for High Gloss Ceilings were made in Lisbon in 2016, where I rented an apartment for a month to have time to experiment with my new interest in graphic, abstracted narratives.

In 2006-2008 I lived in New Brunswick and reinvented my approach to painting through a therapeutic process of working from observation, creating numerous still lives, figure studies and landscape paintings and drawings. Several of the works from this period are in the show and were made during trips from New Brunswick to Mexico, western and central Canada and the southern United States.

Pieces from 2005 were created while I lived in an attic on Beverly and Baldwin Street in Toronto and are mostly finished works done with gouache on paper. I consider them drawings as they were done in one sitting and have an immediate quality to them.

The earliest works in the show were created in 1996-1997 while I finished my studies at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver. Drawing during this time was a large part of my early practice. The pieces were made through a stream of consciousness, created daily, sometimes in the dozens as I began to construct my visual languages.

Jay Isaac
January 2025


Jay Isaac (b. 1975, Saint John, NB) is a multi-disciplinary artist of Lebanese and Irish descent. He studied at the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, Vancouver, Canada (1993-1997) and the Cardiff Institute of Art, Cardiff, Wales (1996). His work has been widely exhibited, with notable exhibitions at Galleria d’art moderna di Bologna, Bologna; MOCA Toronto; James Fuentes LLC, NYC; Mercer Union, Toronto; Galerie Kunstbuero, Vienna; The Power Plant, Toronto; Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, NB; White Columns, NYC; Cue Art Foundation, NYC; Agnes Etherington Art Center, Kingston, ON; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; The AGO, Toronto; CAG, Vancouver; Night Gallery, LA; Monte Clark Gallery, Toronto/Vancouver; Galleri Benoni, Copenhagen; McIntosh Gallery, London, ON; Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto.

Isaac was co-founder and publisher of Hunter and Cook Magazine (2009-2011), and ran the @nationalgalleryofcanada Instagram account (2015-2016) and the @newbrunswickartistarchive Instagram account 2022-present. He was the founder and co-director of Peter Estey Fine Art (2018-2023), an artist-run dealership focusing on secondary market folk, outsider, Inuit and Canadian art. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including most recently: New Brunswick Arts Board Creation Grants (2025, 2024, 2023), Canada Council Concept to Realization and Research and Creation Grants (2022), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2021), and the Chalmers Art Fellowship (2019). Isaac’s work can be found in numerous public and corporate collections in Canada including the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, The Royal Bank of Canada, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, ON, the Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound, ON and the Ivey School of Business Collection at Western University. Isaac is represented by Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto, and lives and works in Rowley, New Brunswick.