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John
Fisher: Writers' Rooms III
For his third series
of Writers' Rooms, John Fisher has been working over the past two
years in four countries, refining his response to the character
of houses which once were homes of some of his favourite writers
and composers. Often drawn first to the working desks, studies or
libraries of his subjects, he was also attracted sometimes by other
areas such as bedrooms, which may have nurtured dreams and musings,
as well as drawing- and dining-rooms where echoes may still be caught
of conversation among family and friends.
Visiting the Finca Vigía
at San Francisco de Paula in Cuba where Ernest Hemingway lived for
some twenty years, Fisher found evidence in the arrangement of furniture
of the American writer's distinctive approach to composition - passages
of description to be written longhand, with a typewriter reserved
for dialogue only - with working space spread across several rooms,
many of them boasting Hemingway's cherished hunting trophies.
At Tuusula in rural Finland,
where Jean Sibelius commissioned the architect Sonck to build the
house he was to occupy for more than fifty years, it was the atmosphere
of sustained, palpable calm which impressed the artist, recalling
the silence the composer is known to have imposed on his household
while working.
If one country continues
to dominate Fisher's pantheon of writers, this is without question
Russia. 'Iconic' may be the only word that can do justice to the
impact of Alexander Pushkin's writing room in his elegant, last
apartment in St. Petersburg, an inspiration for so many later writers
from Dostoevsky to Tolstoy, working in many genres to develop what
they saw to be his legacy.
In the Vladimirsky District
of St. Petersburg, the setting for many of Fyodor Dostoevsky's stories
and novels, the author's modest apartment seemed to the artist filled
still with his restless energy, expended regularly in all-night
bouts of writing punctuated during the day by meetings with students
and other callers anxious for his advice. Its cramped simplicity
contrasts strongly with the spacious home of another highly productive
writer, Maxim Gorky, who moved into the grand Ryabuschinsky Mansion
in Moscow on his triumphant return from Faschist Italy in 1931.
The house still contains much of the previous owner's collection
of Far Eastern art, whose opulence provided a stimulating background
for Gorky's vast output of plays, literature and journalism, much
of it taking shape like some massive military exercise at his imposing
writing desk.
For an earlier series
of Writers'c Rooms, John Fisher visited the estate of Leo Tolstoy
at Yasnaya Polana. Now he has been staying at the writer's winter
home in Moscow, full of reminders of his simple lifestyle and family
life where children played so important a part. The Russian contribution
to Fisher's new series is completed with subjects observed in the
homes of two composers. At Klin, north-west of Moscow, Piotr Ilyich
Tchaikovsky led a gregarious life, in theory seeking quiet away
from the city but in practice entertaining on a grand scale. Equally
sociable, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov took pleasure in impromptu gatherings
in his Moscow apartment, which also provided a regular venue for
Friday evening concerts in the music room.
In his home country John Fisher has painted in the house on Hampstead
Heath occupied by John Keats for two years only - but two of his
happiest in so short a life - where the rooms seemed to resonate
gently with the fragile appeal of the poet's personality, typically
lingering for instance by a window to glimpse Fanny Brawne, with
whom he shared a garden.
Probably the most flamboyant
writer's home to attract John Fisher in the new series has been
Abbotsford, Walter Scott's baronial castle at Melrose. In the library
there is a double-sided desk designed to enable Scott to work in
his characteristically headlong manner on two books at a time.
For the last groups of
works in the exhibition, painted at the Brontë family parsonage
at Haworth in West Yorkshire, Fisher has chosen to digress, untypically,
from his focus on interiors subjects only, as the surrounding countryside
seemed to play so large a part in the personality of the three writing
sisters (Anne sometimes took her stool on to the moor to write in
the open), while every room in the isolated parsonage seemed to
vibrate still with their intense productivity.
Biography
John
Fisher was born in Coventry in 1938 and educated at Camberwell School
of Art. Since graduating he has practised in several media, including
sculpture and printmaking, but in recent years has worked mainly
in oil on paper and sometimes canvas. Represented by Francis Kyle
Gallery since 1986, Fisher has travelled widely in Europe and Asia
in pursuit of subjects which satisfy his interest in architecture
and landscape, recorded in nine one-man exhibitions: Villages and
Valleys of the Ardèche (1988), Provence and Pamphylia (1989),
Egypt and Italy (1991), Jordan and Italy (1993), Central Asia (1996),
In Mongolia (1998), Writers' rooms (2002), Writers' rooms II (2006)
and Writers' rooms III (2008).
John Fisher has been a regular contributor to many of the Gallery's
theme exhibitions and special projects, including The Italian Journey:
Ten Artists go South in the Footsteps of J W Goethe (1987), Paradise...
is here: Painters in Moghul and Rajput India (1989), Mozart's Travels,
shown at the Lincoln Centre, New York (1991), The Piero Trail (1994)
and The Saxon Shore (Francis Kyle Gallery, 1997 and the King's Lynn
Art Centre, 1998). John Fisher was a major participant in The Art
of Memory: Contemporary Painters in search of Marcel Proust (2000),
the theme exhibition which marked the beginning of his encounters
with writer's rooms, Lair of The Leopard: Twenty artists go in search
of Lampedusa's Sicily (2005), and Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried
Sassoon and his world by twenty-five painters today (2006).
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