Bill Fisher

Bill Fisher's work features abstract paintings that are lyrical, playful, significant, and bold. The paintings are Fisher’s last. The artist passed away April 24, 2017 after a decades-long battle with addiction and consequent health issues. In some ways Fisher’s paintings are reflections of his life. Surfaces are multi-layered, reworked, carved into, smoothed over, and adorned with both universal and personal symbols. They embrace whimsy. They pay homage to the jazz music and musicians Fisher adored. They are replete with lush colors and playful movement. They ask questions. They illustrate Fisher’s deep love for painting. They are indeed self-portraits that reveal the complex and beautiful man Bill Fisher was.
Bill Fisher worked intuitively, marking his panels with raw, broad strokes, creating surfaces simultaneously industrial and primordial in appearance. He generated unusually sumptuous surfaces by applying a combination of cold wax medium, wax stick, and oil paint, almost like icing on a cake. The results are paintings that are concurrently urban and organic. Many reference playful items such as tic-tac-toe boards, ladders, boats, striped stockings, flags, railroad crossings. Fisher offered these fragments as playful allusions rendered through inspired, masterful gestures. He created a perfect dichotomy: actualizing haphazard, yet thoughtfully balanced works. The pieces are neither narrative nor linear, but immediate, evincing the intuitive spontaneity of his process. The artist stated that the works are based on a personal iconography and childhood memories.
Bill Fisher was born in Buffalo, NY in 1957. He lived and worked in Richmond, VA. He exhibited extensively throughout the Washington DC areas, as well as Manhattan, NY.

Submitted by Arden Gallery