Eagle and Child

oil, 2011, 13 x 12in 33x 29cm

Dr Johnson at home, Gough Street

oil, 2010, 35 x 29cm 14 x 11in

John Fisher was born in Coventry in 1938 and educated at Camberwell School of Art, where his tutor for drawing was Euan Uglow. 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 ten 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 2 (2006), Writers' rooms 3 (2008) and Writers' rooms 4 (2010).
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), The Saxon Shore (Francis Kyle Gallery, 1997 and the King's Lynn Art Centre, 1998), Lair of The Leopard: Twenty artists go in search of Lampedusa's Sicily (2005), Everyone Sang: A view of Siegfried Sassoon and his world by twenty-five painters today (2006), РОДИНА (2008) and That gong-tormented Sea: contemporary painters pursue the idea and the reality of Byzantium (2009). In 2000 John Fisher was a major participant in The Art of Memory: Contemporary Painters in search of Marcel Proust, shown also at the National Theatre on the Sound Bank in 2001, the theme exhibition which marked the beginning of his encounters with writers’ rooms.

Comment

A room of one’s own: long before Virginia Woolf coined the phrase, the writer’s study, like the artist’s studio, suggested a whole world of thought. Painters from Velazquez to Picasso experienced the world, the self and art’s history, through the atelier – “one’s little room an everywhere”, a seam of inner life made visible.

These resonances, along with a melancholy sense of the tail-end of modernism, are felt in the delightful, domestic-scaled suite of interiors where John Fisher depicts rooms of great dead writers in precise detail, gently modulated colour harmonies and a meditative tone.

The best are those with a window and a view, suggesting physic tension and outer life: a tropical jungle beyond the balcony of Ernest Hemingway’s pink-hued library near Havana; diffuse light filtering through the birch forests to illuminate the wooden furniture and sparkling white paintwork of Tolstoy’s house outside Moscow.

In contrast, buildings rise sharply outside the packed “In the sitting room, Dostoevsky apartment”, where the oppressive clamour of Raskolnikov’s St Petersburg seems to press in from the street.

Even more claustrophobic is the “Bronte dining room, Haworth”, the strict verticals of the patterned wallpaper set against the rigorous horizontals – table, mantelpiece, bookshelves –recall the dense Bronte manuscripts, economically covered in tiny script, written both across and downwards, in superimposed layers.

Fisher’s small, unpeopled canvases are conversation pieces between past and present, literature and painting. Time stands still, life has stopped – yet an impression of each writer’s character and intellectual tenor is as vividly recreated as a stage set.

JACKIE WULLSCHLAGER, Financial Times

‘Freud once suggested that a house, when summoned in a dream, represents the soul of a dreamer. This is certainly true of writers, who make a profession of dreaming, and whose houses often reflect their spirit long after they have departed the premises. I’ve always been fascinated by houses where writers have lived and worked, and have made far-flung pilgrimages to many of these sites of significant dreaming. One longs to sit in these houses, to wander their dark corridors and look out of their windows, to observe their peculiar angle of vision on the outside world…

John Fisher’s patience, and his willingness to sit for long hours in a writer’s house, have paid off handsomely. These are oil paintings on thick paper, although the painter has somehow managed to create a lightness, almost a transparency in the paint itself reminiscent of watercolours. With a huge capacity for what Keats once called Negative Capability, Fisher has lost himself in these houses, willing to submit to the vision of another artist. This selflessness has allowed him to enter each distinct imagination with a humble reverence, with a modesty that amounts, in the end, to something like courage.’

Jay Parini

‘Painting in a writer’s house can have a profound effect. A place closely associated with someone you already know, if only though his writings and reputation, has a resonance that acts strongly upon the imagination, all the more so when one is alone in the house.’  

‘I am not a nostalgic person, I look forward sooner than back but having reached a certain age that is not always under my control. What has revealed itself to me  is that without my varied and long professional career I would not have developed the skills required to paint these interiors. At the outset, I was unused to working within such confined spaces and looked to history to find ways to help me, using grids as an aide to basic perspective and to control scale. At Camberwell one of my drawing masters had been Euan Uglow whose austere approach encouraged me to impose a further discipline on myself. Later I taught academic perspective for some years. This engraves a sense of spatial order on one’s perceptions but also enables a bending of the rules if necessary. 

John Fisher

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