Untitled - Fish

After a varied series of jobs including jack-of-all-trades for the traveling circus Bill Lynch Shows, Joe Sleep was interned in 1973 at the Halifax Infirmary. It was during a hospital stay in his late fifties that Sleep first began to paint. The artist recalled that "it was the nurses and the workers that started me painting; to keep me out of trouble...They gave me posters to colour and I started drawing my own and I ain't stopped since". Joseph Sleep used many materials in his work - latex, cardboard, canvas and masonite, felt markers, pen, pencil, ballpoint and even spray paint. Some paintings are "suitcase" size (that could be easily packed by tourists) and others are monumental compositions painted on panels eight feet in length. Joseph Sleep died in 1978.