Interview with Jessie Fisher

“Double Valentine with Silenus”, 72″ x 84″, oil on linen, 2011

To paint the observation of a thing with care is to evoke tenderness, and to assume a posture of humbleness about one’s relationship to that subject.  Jessie Fisher’s paintings–seen recently in a survey in Kansas City–are made up of many such moments.  Virtuosity through generosity.  Taut linework creates both tension and resolution–a ribcage pushing outward against the skin covering, a folded cloth gently covering a man’s shoulders, a lock of curly hair.  Layers of paint create slightly-flushed skin tones.  A lot of these things defy reproduction, but are essential to the experience of the paintings.  
At the same time, the paintings are monumental-sized and deal with epic themes and narratives.  Moments of subtle and not-so-subtle pictorial ambiguity occurs in nearly all of the paintings–the reality of the studio in harmony with, and in conflict with, the subject of the paintings.  In The Vexations of Art, Svetlana Alpers writes about such occurences in the work of Vermeer and his contemporaries, “Pictorial ambiguity had, of course, been entertained by painters before the seventeenth century.  The difference that the studio makes is that it frames the ambiguity as originating under particular circumstances.  In the studio, the individual’s experience of the world can be staged as if it were at its beginning.”   Alpers concludes the section with a statement that seems especially appropriate to Jessie Fisher’s paintings: “This gives to studio painting its probing, forward lean.  It is a matter of discovery, not demonstration.”
In the interview that follows, Fisher discusses her studio practice, whether or not its useful to be conservative,  her use of pictorial ambiguity and other ideas that drive her work.  

See more of Jessie Fisher’s work at her website.

Many of us don’t grow up with painting and art as part of our daily life, especially many of us away from the coasts and our routes into the fine arts are circuitous.  Was that your experience?  How and when did you say, ‘I’m going to do this?’

I was born in Omaha, Nebraska and after 6 months my family moved around a bit and found ourselves in Minneapolis where I grew up in a suburb called Wayzata, and to my mother’s excitement, attended college at the University of Minnesota, first as an architecture major, then mathematics with a Studio minor and then as a Fine Art major. When I made the switch to the art department I had planned on finding another school to attend but was offered an apprenticeship with a fresco painter which pretty much finished my undergraduate credits in Minneapolis. I attended the first year of the MFA program at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Scott Seebart (The painter whom I have been with since we were 17. We sat next to eachother in an art class. I asked him to come over to my house after school and help me paint a reflection on a blue bottle.) Realizing this program was not the right environment for us at the time, we dropped out, lived in a lovely green microbus, drove around the country visiting friends at various MFA programs.  We settled at the University of Iowa where I was finally able to take my first life drawing and painting courses at the age of 29. I had always wanted to be a figurative painter but had no methodology as to how to approach the subject, and in Iowa, I was able to sit in on numerous classes taught by Ron Cohen, as well as teach life drawing myself for several years which was essential as I was able to put into words what I had been struggling with. Teaching essentially allowed me to began my life as a serious painter. I applied for a position at the Kansas City Art Institute and am currently an Associate Professor in Painting where I teach amazing students in their sophomore year in painting and elective drawing courses that focus on Life Drawing and Sculpture.

“Nude with Carpeaux Drawing”, 36″ x 24″, oil on linen, 2015

I used to look though a book from my parents library about artwork from the Vatican collection and did a charcoal study of a detail from the Sistine Chapel ceiling.  It was praised for its likeness, but although I was excited about the whole experience I was frustrated that it lacked any of the elegance of the original and I simply could not figure out how to make it better. My mother took me to the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts to see Rembrandt’s Lucretia and to a Calder exhibition at the Walker Art Center. I was thrilled at the austerity and the authority of the institution of the museum.  When comparing the two artists I became aware that my interest was in the craft of painting and not the spectacle of art. In high school, Scott and I drove downtown to evening open model sessions at the Minneapolis College of art and Design (MCAD). Although I was frustrated with the quality of my drawings, it seemed like the most authentic way in which to spend my time and a very intimate experience to share with Scott. There was something so beautiful about the entire environment. One of the evenings, a homeless man wandered into the classroom off the street, stood quietly looking at the model for about 10 minutes and then threw a quarter in the basket and walked out.

“Nude with Carpet”, 56″ x 72″, oil on linen, 2015

What are you working on now?

I just started two mid-size (roughly 5′ x 6′) paintings of my model Anna, an incredibly poised opera singer who has proportions similar to Greek statuary and is a doppelgänger for one of Corot’s models.  Also, a series of self-portraits and a group of portraits and nudes of my son in preparation for him to pose for a long-term painting. Recently, I have begun to study sculpture with a group of professors from southern China and am preparing to teach a new elective course that compares the practice of drawing from the sculpture collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art with sculpting from a model in the classroom. This summer, while working with this group, called Studio Nong, the professors took me aside, and in a very serious tone, informed me that Professor Qin, (whose teacher studied with Maillol) impressed with my progress, was going to sculpt a portrait of me before they left and that I was to make a study of it in order to take the next step in my research. I am starting the sculpture tonight and plan to bring it to China this summer as a gift.

What is the hard part of painting for you?

Having to leave my studio.

 “Skeletons with Watermelons”, 82″ x 84″, oil on linen, 2015

Are you conservative, or academic?

I thought this was a very interesting question. Rather than conservative, I see my work as subversive in relation to much of contemporary painting and see much of contemporary painting as extremely conservative. I consider the term academic to be a compliment, as I see this a type of authorship. One that is completely present in the awareness of its own making, while being simultaneously in command of its lineage. I see this sensibility dripping from the walls in central Italy and in painters like Titian, Corot, Bonnard and Balthus. Compositional and technical extravagance tempered with analytical rigor; painting about painting.

“Megan with Jade Plant”, 32″ x 24″, oil on linen, 2012

I love that answer!   I get the sense that, while you dispute some of the common meanings or implications of those two words, both are quite useful to you.  Is that accurate?

I do resist common, or current connotations of these terms because I often find they are used in a qualitative manner and that astounds me. To qualify a mode of consideration is limiting and additionally lays bare the fact that the critic is giving an opinion and not responding to the context of the work. Strangely apt to this question, my mother recently met John Cleese after a lecture where he was speaking about the creative process in relation to several books that he has co-authored on the psychology of the creative mind. His potent piece of advice, in addition to the fact that anxiety and distraction are the enemies of the creative practice, was that, ‘very few things matter and that most things don’t matter at all.’ What matters to a studio practice is a direct engagement with an unbiased and open process and not with current boundaries, definitions or camps with in a discipline. Too often, when a student defines the conservative in their work, I find that they are naming things they are avoiding based on the opinions of their perceived tastemakers, and where they see innovation, they are often aligning themselves with a current trend.

In terms of an academic structure, I think there is a great deal to learn from the question which resulted in the French Academy’s possible misunderstanding of Alberti’s Di Pittura: What are the universal concerns for a painter?  How can one define the larger pursuit of all painters in a manner that does not create a hierarchy yet acknowledges universality?

 Then, to elaborate on that:  I’m really interested in the difference between material that’s useful for artists and material that’s relevant in some kind of “defining themes of an era” way.  We all know certain discussions that have outlived any possible relevance  (i.e. the death of painting, or any antagonism between representational and abstract ways of painting).  Still, certain artists, on a personal, private level nonetheless find motivation in these discussions.  These are artists making art that can be advanced or complex in response to a discussion that has become outdated or one-dimensional.  Speaking as an artist, or as a teacher, do you have any thoughts about the difference between useful and relevant?

I think one of the most interesting questions in a painting practice is how to be simultaneously of the present in the work and at the same time speak to a well-articulated lineage. This binary is at the core of painting, as it is essential to develop the ability to move fluidly through an ascetic relationship to influence and an immersion with in it.

Related to that, I believe that any topic can be beneficial to a studio practice as long as that is not the extent of the work. Work that relies on thematic concerns of an era can be limited in its consideration of the universal. Painters such as Morandi have the most revolutionary of paintings as they function outside of their epoch of making. They function on a level that is outside of dichotomy. While polemical modes of argument are useful as a way to amplify distinctions within a range of considerations, a painting is not an opinion on a scale, it is an ineffable investigation which is a result of an engagement with simultaneous phenomena. Abstraction is both a structure and a language and does not negate representation, rather it is at its core.

It is important to consider if decisions your are making in the studio are in relation to parameters set up by others, or as David Hickey would say, if you are making ‘dogma for the King.’

“Ashley with Green Fabric”, 38″ x 44″, oil on linen, 2015

What is a day in the studio like for you?

I paint at home–where Scott and I and our fabulous son Valentine have, with the generous support from my mom and my job–created a compound dedicated to painting. My studio is in the backyard with high ceilings, skylights and enough space for a group of large paintings.  Scott works in the sun-drenched attic studio.  We have a new studio inside we call the ‘Matisse’ studio, and a smaller studio outside for clay and plaster and anything that produces dust. A day in the studio starts with coffee and omelettes with Scott who is also preparing for his day in his studio. I get my lighting set, my music on and paint anywhere from 4-12 hours, meeting Scott inside for lunch. My model comes 2-3 times a week and we rotate between poses, day and evening. When I don’t have a model in the evening right now, Tino poses for me in exchange for being able to watch the next episode of I, Claudius. Right now everyone has been poisoned except for Claudius.

 I’m really interested in this family/home/studio dynamic you described earlier.  Painting is usually thought of as a sort of lonely, individual activity, not communal/collective/altruistic in the way other arts can be.  I’m wondering if  from your point of view, there is a way to think of painting as more of a group project?  Even though significant parts of the making and viewing is experienced at the individual level? 

I am an intensely private person so the independence of a painting practice is a natural extension of how I like to spend my time. Scott and I are conscious of separating ourselves from exterior influences and are trying to maintain a home that is dedicated to painting. While we prefer to move through the world with anonymity, a large aspect of our practice is an engagement with paintings, drawings and sculptures that we return to again and again. These invisible teachers generate our collective discourse. An individual’s aesthetic development, forged over time in relation to making and viewing work is where I see the altruism in a painting practice. This individual act allows one to join in an ongoing, communal conversation. However much I enjoy painting alone in my studio, I do take solace in the knowledge that painters I know or admire throughout the world are painting everyday in their studios. While it would be cool to take over a small section of Rome and move all the painters I feel connected to, to work together on my street, I ultimately think it is important for a painter to move in and out of the studio, the landscape and the museum without diversion.

As a teacher I think it is important to help my students be able to make work without the need of validation from a group, yet, I do stress the importance of learning from all work they encounter, regardless of its stylistic leanings, in order to develop a complex sense of taste that can follow them into an objective studio practice.

“Self Portrait with Obie”, oil on prepared paper, 2012

Tell us about one useful thing you were taught or told?

I can tell you 3 things:

In undergraduate school, my Professor Victor Cagliotti–in very exited manner and referring to a series of paintings I was working on–pointed out that I had begun to make decisions based on compositional relationships rather than in relation to the narrative of my literary source. He said, “That’s it, you’ve done it! You never have to worry about what to paint again.” The paint-maker Robert Doak, whose magical products I highly recommend, told me, “If you want to learn about composition, to paint like Titian, you need at least 5 figures in your painting. Otherwise you’re taking it easy, you see?” Scott told me, in front of a large canvas at a Bonnard retrospective while he was holding my hand, “Bonnard loved his wife.”

Tell us about one useful thing you learned for yourself?

Subject is meaningless.

“Argus with Still Life”, 84″ x 78″, oil on linen, 2015

With your most recent work, the idea of Magic Realism seems relevant–of the literary variety.  In writers like Calvino, Eco or Salman Rushdie unbelievable allegorical devices are uncomfortably juxtaposed with situations that may be otherwise ordinary, mundane or familiar.  Even with your statement that subject is meaningless, I’m wondering if there is for you any meaning or resonance that exists in the presentation of different categories in one pictorial space? 

Of course, subject is everything, but I view subject as the approach to the work and not the descriptive, symbolic or referential. Presentation itself is the entirety of the subject. In Self-portrait with Green Wallpaper, the space of the portrait is both compressed and opened up with the inclusion of the edge of the mirror, shifting the usually flattening effect of the wallpaper pattern. This idea preceded the pose and resolution of the figure in preparation for the intimacy of the image. I am very deliberate in the development of variation within a thematic structure while at the same time maintaining the whole. The stronger the leitmotif, the more I can challenge the image, including secondary or tertiary structures, the development of form as an interloper that move through the entirety of the image.

The moment in The Distance of the Moon [by Italo Calvino], when the moon first moves so close to the earth that you can climb up onto it is extraordinary in its shift of the normative scale relationship between the two celestial bodies. This shift, first envisioned in the readers mind as an inevitable possibility, is suddenly concretized through a moment of touch as casually plausible. Things have changed and the reader cannot go back. Calvino seems to use the ordinary as a site for this rupture and I think that time-based work is asked to introduce events like this to a greater degree than a contemplative object. Painting presents itself as atemporal, creating a dream as the information unfolds.  A painting can display what the linear in writing cannot, allowing for multiple simultaneous outcomes and shifts in hierarchies that are fluid at different distances from the surface, yet, even as I embrace the anomalous, I am conscious to avoid rupture.

I am very aware that when I am working in the extraordinary space of allegory, such as in Skeletons with Watermelons, there are things I can do that would rupture the context within a portrait or a nude. Because this is in the realm of the poetic, there is no need to cast reflections in the mirror, or to take into account that the viewer is standing in the low-tide that is washing watermelons ashore towards the love-affair between the skeletons. The subject is found in the reflexive way that all of the impossibilities and symmetries speak to possibilities fro reverie in a painting.

In Argus and Still life, I wanted to portray the time in the story before the rescue of Io, resulting in the death of Argus. I wanted to revise the outcome of the story, showing Argus as already blind, with Io content to stay with him as the white cow. I have always felt an incredible empathy towards the forlorn creatures from mythology that are put in service of others. Rather than waiting until Argus’ eyes are plucked out and given to the peacocks tail, the tree bark becomes a depository for his vision in the form of the markings throughout the forest. With his vision lost, he has no need to stay to watch over Io and that she could leave at any moment. I wanted to highlight the idea that Argus and Io were content to stay in a separate space, placing the two across a river inhabited by nymphs. I knew I would have at least 5 figures–as the fabulous Mr. Doak suggested–and saw the idea of the barrier between the ‘protagonist’ Hermes and his quarry as the structure I wanted to play with. When creating a line of figures emerging from the water as an undulating repoussior, I wanted to create an oblique entry into the image from the lower left which allowed Argus to remain enthroned at the top right while still embedded within the landscape he and Io inhabit. To add to these considerations, and in response to discussions I was having with some of my painting students regarding trompe l’oeil, I wanted to see if I could literally place a still life in front of the image in the painting that would not become a parody of the composition, but rather would act as an additional repoussior that mirrored and matched the complexity of the submerged figures. Adding the gladiolus framing the oblique entry and creating a point within the image that was projected from the stalks, I saw that the upper tip of the triangle was not as dominant as I had hoped, so I brought in the egg from Piero’s Pala Montefeltro.

Despite all of this, drawing is where I find the most pleasure and my approach to composition is my attempt to translate the morphology of illusion into a site for form. In the end, it is the fiction and theatricality in painting which interest me the most and I have come to find that they are most present when juxtaposed against the scrutiny of observation.

 

“Self Portrait with Green Wallpaper”, 40″ x 24″, oil on panel, 2014

Yes!  Thank you, Jessie Fisher.

 

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