Shapeshifting With Paint: Meet Jack Trolove

Jack Trolove in the studio with Turlough. Source: Supplied 

Having lived all over the world, painting in Barcelona, Glasgow and Melbourne, Jack Trolove found and fell in love with painting in Oxford, Canterbury. After 25 years of big cities, Trolove is living rurally again, but this time on the Kaipara Harbour in Northland, making art which resonates across Aotearoa. 

Trolove paints liminal space, and his studio is home to everything that emerges on the threshold of transition. His portraits are abstract depictions of ephemeral emotions in oil paint. One face can hold both joy and grief, capturing transience on canvas. 

Trolove has always loved art, particularly the way it can generate social change and become an emotive form of activism, he told Canta.  

“[It’s] a challenge, tonic, or a balm for all the ways we feel,” he said, an impact which extends past that of language.  

The small art room of his rural high school has had a massive impact on Trolove, who said that above all else he could always look forward to what he calls extreme, delicious chaos.  

“Rules of the outside world didn’t apply and creativity exploded, sometimes literally.”  

Since those days, Trolove has gone on to have a dynamic career in Aotearoa and internationally. Today, he works with oil paint rather than crayons, and although melted crayola’s are no longer a daily sight at the Trolove studio, he uses the very same experimental impulses now as he used to.  

Installation view from the exhibition Thresholding at Pātaka Art + Museum. Source: Supplied. 

A recent solo at Pātaka Art + Museum, saw Trolove turn a white-box art gallery into the black-box of theatre, or the cave. Plunging paintings into darkness, and showing them in half lights, was a striking choice that Trolove called “the beautiful trans bodies of dusk and dawn.”  

For Trolove, emotion and art are inseparable. 

“I try to make paintings that remind us how much emotional muscle we have. The materiality of paint holds a lot - it can carry gestures and energies that are unsettling, disturbing or blissful, and sensations like plummeting and flight, simultaneously. The more years I spend painting, the more magical it seems to me.”   

Trolove said oil paint definitely has some restrictions, one of which being drying time.  

“Turns out though, in spite of many noble attempts to get me to understand deadlines - oil paint was the one thing that has taught me to be organised,” he said.  

Detail from The Thick Skin of a Pronoun. Source: Supplied  

Trolove works in an impasto style, laying paint on the canvas with a palette knife so strokes and layers are visible. Oil paint takes years to fully dry, sometimes even upwards of 40, but the viscous colours get tacky after a few hours, and artists like Trolove can't drag the knife through the laid paint, so he often has a three-to-four-day window for enormous paintings, sometimes painting solidly for 14 hours a day. 

As the oil paint dries, it changes, hardens over the canvas like a stretched skin. And for Trolove, that experience feels remarkably human. 

Trolove is most interested in stories of change, myths of shapeshifting between states, like the stories of Selkies from the Celtic world, that shift from seal to human form. He said; “shifting between emotional states like grief and love can change us physically.” 

In spite of social pressure to fit into binary categories, according to Trolove, “the really magical experiences in life are not tethered in that way.”  

Detail from Arc. Source: Supplied.  

In terms of studio-lore, Trolove told Canta it is first and foremost a messy place, one of many traits he picked up from teacher, Brent Firkin, and much of which he has passed down in his own years of teaching in university and community contexts.  

In teaching his own students, Trolove has often returned to the things he first learned from Brent Firkin and high school art.  

“So many of the things he used to say that I no doubt appeared to ignore at the time were exactly what I found myself saying to students and artists I worked with,” he said.   

Trolove has loved passing down all that he’s learnt. Alongside teaching, he also spent years juggling his creative work with activism and working in suicide prevention, mental health and homelessness, as well as LGBTQIA+ community organisations.  

But in everything Trolove has done, there has always been one common thread - emotional connection. Every emotion, every painting, is connected.  

“Physically, we're connected to everything else in the world because we're literally made up of the same matter,” he said.  

There can be no art without change, and there can be no change without emotion. It is the pieces of ‘almost’ that Trolove turns into canvas, and it is their innate emotion that makes his painting so deeply connective.