Dan Fisher

For years I have been working intuitively on a modified perspective based on my sense that the interior forms in my work needed a relationship to the edge, and also be partially defined by the edge. In linear perspective, the edge of an image plays no role in its construction. We plot out the lines of the forms according to strict rules, but how the image is cropped is arbitrary. This seemingly insignificant fact takes on a wallop of importance if we realize what the edge represents. In a nutshell, we are the edge. The visual reality we witness ends with the outside dimensions of our eyesight, which is essentially us. We might imagine that reality extends infinitely behind us, but we never actually see it.

Early on in my work I began to feel a physical connection with the reality around me, sometimes so intense it was frightening and disorienting. I was having trouble imposing the disconnection needed to construct a rational and objective picture of the world. This is something we're taught at an early age and soon becomes automatic and unconscious. We rely heavily on it heavily for the sense of security and stability it provides. Losing it (as the saying goes) was scary. Nonetheless, I realized I was onto something important because the intensity of the reality around me was remarkable. Over the years, I've become less threatened by it and mostly relax into it.

The relationship this has to Modernism is striking. In art history books and museums we've told the story of what happened with Modernism, but we seldom ask why it needed to happen. I view linear perspective's lack of connection to the edge/us as a fatal flaw that the visionary artists of Modernism knew had to be addressed. The trouble was, this view was so welded into our culture and consciousness it had to be totally disassembled before it could be reassembled in a new form. I think in large part we are still waiting for that new form, and I am doing my level best to find it. I find it no coincidence that the current big-picture view of the universe is dominated by quantum theory which provides an irrational behavioral model. The "observer phenomenon" states that an object is changed by the act of observation. So much for objectivity/ disconnection. Like it or not, we are irrevocably connected to our environment. It is my feeling that were we to accept and develop this connection, we might immensely enhance our knowledge, awareness and experience of the world. Art can lead the way.

Since graduation I have made the conscious choice to live and work in close association with rural nature full time. I love the city with it’s human and cultural resources, but I can manage without it. I can’t manage to do my work without the natural environment around me. It has been a little lonely but not as much as you might expect. I had the good fortune to meet and marry Wendy, a talented and visionary writer who shares my need for closeness to nature. We have gotten by with outside income from editing (Wendy) and contracting (me). By keeping our lifestyle spare we have managed to spend two thirds of the last 30 years on our own work and passion. We are essentially educated outsiders with nothing impressive to show as a resume. Over the last 18 years I have sold a few on-site easel painting in a nearby tourist gallery, but that pretty much sums it up.

Pratt Institute; BFA, Painting and Drawing 1974
New York Studio School, 1972

Dan Fisher was born in the mountains of western North Carolina and left for New York when he was 17. He has a BFA in painting and drawing from Pratt Institute and studied also at the New York Studio School. His home and studio are in Jamaica, Vermont, but he still calls Asheville, Los Angeles and New York home, having divided his time between them for the past 35 years. His paintings have been exhibited in Boston, Los Angeles, North Carolina and New York City where a large-scale sculpture he built on site is a part of the collection of the Pratt Sculpture Park in Brooklyn. He was awarded the Award of Excellence for a Two-Dimensional Work at the Stratton Arts Festival in 1999 by juror Janet Fish. Numerous public and private collections contain his work. “All of these paintings are done primarily on site from a rolling palette table I designed and built. I’m a bit of an outward-bound artist, not drawn to the pastoral or predictable. I want to show you something you’ve never seen, and if you look long enough you’ll see even more.”

2016 "Wide Open" BWAC - Brooklyn, New York (Group Show)
2014 "Color Show" - BWAC - Brooklyn, New York (Group Show)
2004 Pratt Sculpture Park (Installation)
2005-Present Franklin 54 Gallery - New York, New York (Group Show)
2005 Furchgott-sourdiffe Gallery - Burlington, Vermont (Solo Exhibition)
2000 Southern Vermont Art Center - Manchester, Vermont (Solo Exhibition)
1999 MPG Gallery - Boston, MA "Symbolic Woman: Women as Subject and Object"
1998 University of the South - Sewanee, TN (Solo Exhibition)
1998 Collected Works Gallery - Brattelboro, Vermont (Solo Exhibition)
1996 Gallery 825 - Los Angeles, CA (Group Show)
1996 Mini-Mall Six - Los Angeles, CA (Group Show)
1993 AB Gallery - Los Angeles, CA (Group Show)
1992 Ersgard Gallery - Santa Monica, CA (Group Show)
1981 Asheville Art Museum - Asheville, NC (Solo Exhibition)
1979 Green Hill Gallery