Tuscan Cow

The physical, “real” world is visually fascinating to me; I strive to represent solid forms with fidelity--figure, tree, cup, etc.--with a sense of breathable air around them combined with a tactile quality of surface which can bring the viewer closer to the painting and the made by hand process which was employed to make it. My preference is for "suggested "color as opposed to "saturated" color. I seek an interrelationship and fluidity between the forms represented. The feeling that is most often repeated in my work is that of equilibrium and balance and occasionally a gentle lyricism. Most importantly, I purposely try to avoid over-explaining my art with the hope that the viewer comes away with her or his impressions, interpretation, or narrative of the work, when that happens naturally I feel the work is serving its purpose.  --Dean Fisher



​Education:

1978 – 1982 American Academy of Art, Chicago, Illinois

1984 – 1988 Independent Study; Copied Old Master paintings in the Prado Museum; Madrid, Spain, The Louvre Museum; Paris, France, The National Gallery of Art; London, England


Selected Collections:

McGraw–Hill Publishers New York, NY

H&G Television Knoxville, Tennessee

Scripps Howard Cable Corporation


Listen to an audio interview with Dean Fisher on Savvy Painter

From Artscope.net:

To enter Byron Roche Gallery's showing of paintings by Dean Fisher is to enter upon both an imagination and a universe. And it is, as the French poet/critic observed, a creative and original place -- a world with its own values and raison d'etre -- mute, playful, observant and aware, gentle and benevolent. Dean Fisher's new paintings constitute a virtual commedia dell'arte of the soul. The gallery visitor may enter in the midst of it all until October 16, when the full Dean Fisher exhibition comes to a close.


"The imagination assigns" a place and a relative value to images and actions. What brings Baudelaire and the French Symbolists to mind in viewing Dean Fisher's art is the artist's approach to painting. The gallery statement notes: "The subjects of Fisher's paintings are chosen and combined to be visually interesting and to imply an overall state of being, rather than to tell a literal story. After selecting subjects that hold a visual fascination for him, Fisher arranges them to achieve a sense of calm and order, suggestive of an idealized inner world." The artist himself was quoted in a Daily Herald profile (Sept. 16, 1999) as seeking not reality, but "atmosphere."