It all started with painting Hot Wheels.
Ray Bishop, current Baldwin Exotic Collection artist extraordinaire, used to steal his mother’s nail polish and give the iconic little cars new paint jobs. If it wasn’t nail polish, it was any other medium he could get his hands on—pencils, crayons, markers, paint, Sharpies, etc. And if it wasn’t Hot Wheels, it was model cars or t-shirts.
You get the picture (no pun intended).
“Actually, I used to paint everything I could get my hands on,” Bishop said recently from his home in Grand Blanc, Michigan. “I really don’t know where it came from, though my dad used to paint some. But I never dreamed that someday I would be making a decent living from painting.”
Bishop not only does make a decent living at it, he has slowly but surely built an international reputation as one the world’s leading graphic artists.
“I was never the kind of person to sit behind a desk and do the corporate thing. That way of life just wasn’t for me,” Bishop said. “Looking back on it, I was actually pretty unemployable.”
With no real training or advanced education, Bishop jumped from job to job for most of the early 1990s while trying to launch his career as an artist. He married, started a family, and basically dreamed of someday doing what he loved to do more than anything—paint. With his wife’s encouragement, and a few lucky breaks, Bishop turned an unusual idea into a life-changing event.
“I had just started a graphic arts business with the airbrush my wife bought me for my birthday, and business was really, really slow,” Bishop recalled. “Then I was at this party watching a hockey game on television and I noticed that the goalie was wearing a white mask. Something inside of me said, ‘Hey, I want to paint that guy’s mask.’”
One thing led to another, and Bishop was soon painting hockey masks for local school kids and other amateur goalies in the area. Before long, his work had garnered the attention of the equipment manager for the Detroit Vipers of the International Hockey League, and finally, in 1997, Bishop painted his first professional hockey mask for Vipers’ goalie Jeff Reese.
A few months later, Bishop painted his first National Hockey League mask for goalie Roman Turek of the Dallas Stars.
“Things just sort of snowballed from there,” Bishop said.
Actually, business went berserk. Bishop had unsuspectingly created his own niche, and soon found himself painting 40 to 50 masks at the beginning of each hockey season, charging $800-to-$1,200 per mask. Business was so good, in fact, that Bishop concentrated solely on hockey masks for several years. Today, many NHL goalies wear his work, and all usually request new designs at the beginning of each season.
But like many artists, Bishop would eventually need new inspirations for his work. In 2006, one of his hockey clients, Buffalo Sabres goalie Ryan Miller, requested he paint a Gibson Les Paul to auction for charity. In the process, Miller introduced Bishop to Tina Simpkins, Gibson’s entertainment relations representative in Toronto. Their business relationship blossomed, and Bishop soon found himself painting guitars for members of Finger Eleven, Theory of a Deadman, and Dwight Yoakam, among others.
“He wanted a pin-up girl on each of his three acoustic guitars,” Bishop said of his work for Yoakam. “So I painted a blonde, a brunette, and a red head on each individual one, and—as far as I know—he’s playing them right now.”
Simpkins was so impressed with Bishop’s work that she referred him to representatives at Baldwin piano, who had just launched the exclusive “Exotic Collection” of grand pianos adorned with wild designs and customized paints. So far, it’s been a match made in heaven.
Bishop’s first design was the “Patriotic,” which featured metallic stars and stripes covering the rim, lid, and music desk of a Baldwin grand piano. Inside the rim are the words, “Land of the Free, Home of the Brave,” with a stunning eagle design on the underside, and custom red plate and keys accented by nickel hardware.
His second design is called the “Hendrix Inspired” piano, which—you guessed it—is a tribute to the legendary guitarist. The design is based on the Jimi Hendrix Psychedelic Flying V produced by the Gibson Custom Shop in 2006, which was a painstaking recreation of Hendrix’s hand-painted 1967 Flying V. Bishop incorporated the guitar’s swirling psychedelic colors and designs into an original and stunning display of his artistic expertise, highlighted by a full-size profile of Hendrix underneath the lid.
Bishop is currently working on his third contribution to Baldwin’s Exotic Collection, tentatively titled the “High Roller” piano. Bishop said the underside of the lid will feature a drawing of a hand throwing a set of dice, but adds the rest of the design is yet to be finalized.
“It’s pretty much in the preliminary stages, but it will be done in the next four to six weeks,” Bishop said.
Bishop’s shift to painting Baldwin pianos has also forced him to seek a bigger work space to accommodate his increasingly larger canvases. His new studio is now located in the paint and body shop of Joe Panian Chevrolet in Southfield, Michigan.
“I met them through one of my hockey clients, and I had all these pianos being delivered to my house with no room to store them,” Bishop said. “The dealership has everything I need to paint right there in one place, and people come by to check out what I’m working on all day long. It sort of gives them a bit of excitement throughout the day, so it’s pretty cool all the way around.”
Bishop hopes to do a few more projects with Baldwin, and possibly other Gibson-owned companies. And if his earlier projects are any indication, be prepared for a few interesting—and fascinating—works of art.
“As an artist, the more diverse you are the better,” Bishop said. “I absolutely love what I’m doing, and I enjoy working with good people you can trust. This whole opportunity to paint pianos is mind boggling to me. I mean, for the longest time there were no options to pianos other than black and white. Now, Baldwin has all these artists and great looking pianos and it’s great to be a part of it.”