Strange Memoriam

I randomly overhauled my website today, and I kind of want to save this strange, old version of my “about” page. It feels odd to me not because anything I said in there is wrong - I still agree with what I said there - but the language is alien to me. It is the language I adopted when I made my art career my main focus for the first time and I was trying to figure out what shape I was supposed to present to the Art World to be seen and taken seriously. Several years on now and I guess I’ve found a less contrived voice, if not a completely authentic one (I’m trying!). Probably I’ve finally just relaxed a bit. Anyway, here it is:

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Fisher has felt the urgency to create their entire life, but only in their twenties did they truly enter the world of Art. As a self taught artist, this pursuit started as a technical one focused on skills, anatomy, and rendering without much thought to meaning or feeling. 

Our modern desperation for meaning led Fisher to attempt to revive archaic stories and archetypes through their art. This proved to be a path towards contrivance. The meaning-making structures of our collective past simply did not connect with the modern mind. Their attempts to conceive of their own meanings felt similarly hollow, though the power of erotic art did hold sway for a time.

In their thirties, they began channeling their art exclusively through a shamanic process. Putting their critical, logical, conceptual mind away, they instead attended to the richness of their lived experience and became saturated with qualia. Being attentive in this non-conceptual way allows raw experiences to find their way to the Deep Mind where Fisher believes True meaning to be cultivated rather than constructed. During the act of creation, Fisher now allows faith to guide their hand, allowing the harvest of cultivated meaning to percolate up from the Deep. The symbols and compositions that arise are allowed to manifest through Fisher without question. Like a dream, the resulting work is always mysterious and compelling - not conveying meaning but inviting the blossoming of meaning in the soul of the viewer. Fisher considers the paintings that result from this process to be more akin to sermons, poetry, or mystical utterances than to the contrived conceptual.

Fisher now requires that all commissioned pieces follow this process. The process of sowing the Deep Mind for a commission is a delicate, sacred one. Clients will meet with Fisher several times at their homes and at Fisher’s studio to develop a trusting relationship. Clients will entrust Fisher with the story of their families, their secret pain, their joy, their lived experiences. These stories, places, and images are allowed to sink into the Deep Mind via meditation until harvest time.