James Fisher

“My current paintings are like ghost schema, assemblages of images and surface that generate spectral encounters”.

Through a technique of building imagery and patterned layers, Fisher creates beautiful patinas within the surface of paintings, working them back with sandpaper and turpentine. His painting Oh He Shams is inspired by John Clare’s poetry and the protagonist of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise Song Cycle. The artist interprets man’s relationship with nature, in particular our sensitivity towards current climate and ecological issues, visually manifested in the depicted figure tenderly cradling a bird. Darkness Has A Cheating Swiftness came from a euphonious experience Fisher had when listening to the choir sing at Gloucester Cathedral. The two areas of the piece, one demarcated from the other by a central motif, infer the loud and quiet differing audacious rhythms of a hymn.