Meet Renowned Printmaker Stephen Fisher - Inside Art With Michael Rose

Meet Renowned Printmaker Stephen Fisher - Inside Art With Michael Rose

 

Stephen Fisher is one of the region’s most celebrated artists. His art has been shown throughout the country, including solo features at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Frye Museum in Seattle. The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns his work. In addition to being a well-regarded practitioner, he is also a storied professor who taught at Rhode Island College for over 30 years until his recent retirement. In his life, he has shaped the progress of hundreds of young artists while also making time to have an extensive and impressive career as a printmaker whose work rivals the greats.

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Fisher earned his BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University and his MFA from Yale. He came to work at RIC in 1990 after stints teaching at Wesleyan and the University of Tulsa, among others. A deeply respected maker, he has received three separate Fellowships from the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, as well as a Regional Fellowship from the New England Foundation for the Arts.

 

 

 

Considering how he feels about the conclusion of his long tenure as an educator, Fisher is grateful. He says, “As I retire after 35 years at RIC I leave knowing I have made a difference, building the program and nurturing young artists. I want to thank all my colleagues and a legion of students for their trust and their part in making my time at RIC a rich and rewarding experience. While I won’t miss the commute, and the meetings, I will miss the classroom, and especially the relationships. I learned so much more engaging everyone’s ideas and approaches than I ever learned as a student. Thank you.”

 

 

Fisher’s prints are rich, gritty, and detailed. He works with zinc and copper plates, submerging them in acid baths to etch imagery that take a realistic approach to content like thickly wooded landscapes or slick still lifes. His prints and drawings are defined by their intricacy. A viewer could sit alone with a single Fisher image for a significant period of time and still not take away all the visual information it provides. Dense forests unfurl with every twig and leaf carefully rendered.

 

Reflecting on this quality in his artwork, Fisher says, “I was once told that the ‘problem’ with my prints and drawings is that one must look at them for a long time to see everything that is there. That’s a problem? ‘Look Harder See More’ has been my personal mantra for a long time and common to all the images is my obsession with intense perceptual rigor, compositional manipulation, the viscosity of light, and the tactile, sensual nature of materials. Slow down, take the time to really see.”

 

 

Fisher lives and works in a converted grange hall in Warren with his wife Katie and daughter Crickett who are both also artists. Every corner of their eclectic and artful home is a curated view into shared familial interests. Antique toys and art books are displayed alongside Stephen’s assemblage sculptures which combine the skeletal remains of animals with found objects. Fisher makes different kinds of work throughout the house, assembling sculptures in the attic, drawing in the living room, and printmaking in a dedicated studio below. He is a consummate craftsperson, for whom art and life intertwine.

 

Asked why the art of fine printmaking has held his attention for all these years, Fisher says, “In printmaking I am particularly seduced by the physicality and richness range of the etched mark, the reworkability of the plate, and the patient process of building an image layer by layer. The indirectness of the medium adds an element of unpredictability and problem-solving to the process. At each stage, I don’t know what I actually have until I pull a print. Often it doesn’t do just what I intended, so I ask, ‘what did it do and what can I do with that,’ keeping me creatively agile.”

 

 

Collected by major venues, Fisher’s work is owned by numerous institutions in addition to the Met, including the Brooklyn Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, and the National Gallery. Locally, Rhode Islanders have a chance to see some of his art this summer. From July 10 - August 31, Fisher will be one of over 50 important local makers featured in the exhibition Growing the NetWorks at WaterFire Arts Center. The show will open with a reception on July 10 from 5:00 to 9:00 p.m.

 

 

Stephen Fisher is a remarkable Rhode Island artist who now has more time than ever to focus on his personal practice. Active for decades with much success under his belt already, it will be exciting to see what new achievements arise in his next chapter.

 

Learn more about Stephen Fisher at his website www.stephenfisherartist.com.