Barbara Fisher

I went to visit Barbara Fisher's studio when I was in Asheville this July and found a huge shift going on in her work. Known for her colorful iconographic gridded imagery, the work has moved to a dark, mysterious, atmospheric space with merging marks and forms. It feels like a thinking space on a chalkboard. Have a look:

All are oil, oil stick, charcoal, pastel on birch panel

Tangled Thoughts - 30 x 30

Hubris - 16 x 16

Evidence - 40 x 40

Unwinding - 16 x 16

Barbara lists her Influences: early ones include Van Gogh, Gauguin, Klee.The German Expressionists,  Guston.  New Image painters of the early '80's (Jennifer Bartlett, Susan Rothenberg).
Non artist influences - Carl Jung and other psycho-philosophers. Contemporary physicists - Mario Livio, Brian Green.

She is currently in  Southern Abstraction: A New Look at the Mobile Musuem of Art. In 2013 a solo show is planned for the Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory NC.

For years my artistic language consisted of iconic shapes and symbols, reduced to their simplest forms. I gradually began to break them up into what felt like pieces of images.  Recently they have disintegrated further into fragments of thoughts, gestural marks, and scribbles – hovering in undefined, unrestrained atmospheric spaces.   Switching from canvas to birch panel resulted in a dramatic shift in the work’s physicality. Spontaneous marks provide a history of transformation and change.   The paintings are worked over a long period of time, giving the appearance of old walls that have been written and drawn on for years.

 The history of process and transformation evident in the finished paintings continually reminds the viewer of the inevitability of change and the impermanence inherent in all things.   The wood surfaces are sanded, scribbled on, painted over, wiped off and otherwise distressed.  The essence of my creative inquiry is to dissect and examine again and again my perceptions of truth, reality, and the Self that derive from external sources, turning that experience into a visual record.