BARBARA FISHER
Barbara Fisher is transformative painter; this is what drives her as an artist. As she says: “To quote Carl Jung, ‘In all chaos there is a cosmos, in all disorder a secret order’. I am willing to embrace chaos, in the hopes of finding or creating that secret order.”
For years, Fisher’s artistic language consisted of iconic shapes and symbols, reduced to their simplest forms, interacting with each other, both formally and conceptually. Through her artistic process, Fisher gradually began to break these elements up into pieces of images. What we now see is the disintegration into fragments of thoughts, gestural marks, and scribbles – hovering in undefined, unrestrained atmospheric spaces.
Now, the process has become a part of the narrative. The wood surfaces are sanded, drawn on, painted over, wiped off and otherwise distressed as one thought or story or gives way to the next. The history of process and transformation evident in the finished paintings reminds the viewer of the inevitability of change and the impermanence inherent in all things. The work is a visual investigation, a continual inquiry into the way things work, filtered through the artist’s eyes, mind and subconscious.
Barbara Fisher was born in New York City, educated in Colorado and California, and lived for many years on the West coast before she settled down in Asheville, North Carolina in 1998. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows throughout the country, including the de Saisset Museum (CA), Bank of America World Headquarters (CA), The National Institutes of Health (MD) and The Washington Cancer Center (DC) as well as in many galleries.
