Distinguishing elements in Bissonnette's work include: memory-based subject matter; preference for multi-media; endless shaping and reshaping of iconography and symbols including hyperlexia; motion imagery such as wheels and circles; faces, both painted and photographed; marginalia; handmade frames; and commentary on disability issues, for which he is a well-traveled advocate. The titles he gives many of his pieces also bear a personalized, near poetic stamp, such as the 1994 studio-hung miniature featuring a snapshot of his father: “Nowadays a Parent’s Old Portrait Is Presented in a Perfectly Made Picture Frame. My Father, Proud of Son’s Art, Is Best Presented in an Old Wood Frame.”

This image features big, sweeping brush strokes of white and blue mixed together spell out LARRY J BISS in large capital letters across the center of the large, wide painting. In the midground, three windows are painted with the same light blue, with dark blue panes, and the one on the left has a picture of a man with long hair playing the guitar smiling at the camera taped to it. The background is red and black blocks of color. The frame is rough wood that doesn't fit well together in the corners and has hammer strike marks where the artist hammered the frame together with nails.

Most of Bissonnette's paintings include frames he has made himself; usually out of thick blocks of wood that can hide or obscure part of the painting. As Lyle Rexer notes in How to Look at Outsider Art, 2005, “the frames add a formality that lifts the work into a realm of intention and public communication.”