Artist Anthony Fisher Photo: Rebecca M. Alvin
Art work photos courtesy of Jim Zimmerman/PAAM
by Rebecca M. Alvin
There’s a video on artist Anthony Fisher’s website in which he explains how he came to invent certain drawing and painting machines. Fisher suffered for years with a condition in both his ankles that left him with very little cartilage, making it painful to walk or even stand, as the ankle bones made contact with each other with no cushion between. When he finally got surgery on the first ankle, it left him unable to put even the slightest bit of pressure on that foot for months. Necessity is famously the mother of invention, and so he began to think about different ways to continue working without standing, besides just sitting in a chair to paint.
“Eventually, all the drawings I was making while I was confined to this chair drawing, I guess I started getting kind of bored,” he recalls. That boredom, combined with the chaos of his studio (“I have a very messy studio,” he admits), is what led him to come up with his idea for these so-called drawing machines, as he noticed the chair he had been using, which had repeatedly run ramshackle across cast-off drawings he’d thrown on the floor, had created lines and swirls on the floor. He found inspiration in these unintentional markings.
“I started finding the tracks left by charcoal on the wheels were more interesting than the drawings.”
How so? He says they were “less affected or premeditated. They were just fresh and had rhythms and spontaneity. They were kind of mindless, but at the same time, if I edited them, they were quite interesting… So then I started enjoying a process where I could just invite a lot of marks and rhythms and things to just sort of happen through serendipity or just through these processes. And then I would spend a lot of time editing and removing, adding, subtracting, whatever.”
Fisher doesn’t come to painting from an artistic family. In fact, he says everyone in his family is a scientist or a doctor or in some other cerebral, logical field. “My father, he was a neurobiologist. (I even got to take a human brain to third grade for show and tell!) And I loved to visit his lab and see stuff. But I kind of worshipped my dad when I was young, and I could only get a rise out of him from doing a drawing or something. He would really be like, ‘Oh, wow.’ He would really appreciate it so much. So, I think part of it was that desire to excite my dad. And he was very encouraging. I think he wanted to be a writer, maybe. I mean, he loved Provincetown. He had this beatnik streak in him where he knew people living in the dune shacks and would play poker with them all night and do all kinds of fun stuff.”
He grew up in Pittsburgh, but he credits Provincetown as at least a part of the reason he found himself gravitating toward artmaking from an early age, saying he remembers coming to the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM) and seeing an Alvin Ross show here when he was about 14 years old.
“Provincetown figures a lot, I think, in my evolution, you know. We’d stay at the Day Hills in the West End, way back, and there was a man named Mr. Maynard who was a watercolor painter. And he’d be out there at night, you know. And I once went up and knocked on his door. He was so sweet. He invited me in and I showed him some drawings. It was very nice. It was great. So, yeah, this place figures into my work or my evolution.”
A professor of painting at UMass Dartmouth, Fisher says he is from time to time astounded by the results some of his students get using tablets to draw as opposed to pencil and paper, but digital artmaking isn’t something he’s that interested in himself.
As he reflects on the different tools he’s using, the engineering involved —one contraption is “literally, a hot water bottle full of white paint suspended like from my studio ceiling, and I turned it, getting it like a pendulum and moving the painting”; another is a large tube he either wraps in drop cloth and paints on or gets inside and actually uses a magnetic device to move a brush on top of the tube from within it, not actually seeing what he’s painting, only relying upon muscle memory to make his lines—he says as far as the tools of AI (artificial intelligence) go, he isn’t too worried about it interfering with the kind of physical art work he is making, even as he accepts its inevitable role in other areas of life.
It may not be so obvious looking at these works on the flat page of a glossy magazine, but when you step into the Hawthorne Gallery at PAAM and see the works, there’s an immediate desire to touch them because it just feels like it’s the thing to do. In fact, the artist himself, seeing them mounted on the wall all together like this says it’s a different experience for him, as well, giving him a greater perspective on his own work.
It’s hard to see how a robot would be able to create the works on view here because they are so deeply personal. You’re confronted with the indisputable evidence of the artist’s labor in looking at these densely layered multimedia paintings; you could almost call them constructions, in fact. Abstract, full of energy, and full of the marks of an artist deeply engaged in his process—mixing hard edges of collage with organic shapes and swirls he says he wouldn’t have the patience to make with a brush alone, but was able to generate with his improvised machines. In a sense, his joy in painting comes not only from the actual work, but also from creating the tools he will use to make the work. And so there is this multifaceted aspect that is intrinsic to its visceral appeal.
While suffering and pain may have brought Fisher to this place in his work, he isn’t someone who valorizes the suffering artist as the model at this point in his career. “I mean, when I was in school, both undergrad and grad, that was still the era of, sort of, heroic painting. And artists suffered. And a lot of my heroes were artists who had taken their lives or had horrible times. And I was happy to kind of get over that eventually and learn how to have fun,” he says. “I think some of the best art was made in particular artists’ times of trial, difficult times in their lives. But I wouldn’t want to be an artist if I know there’s a lot of suffering. It’s good to avoid suffering at all costs, right?”
After reflecting a moment, he adds, “Maybe you can’t avoid it in life. Maybe it helps with distillation of things in a way.”
Anthony Fisher: ReVisions, curated by Don Beal, is on display at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM), 460 Commercial St., now through July 20. There will be an opening reception with the artist on Friday, May 9 at 6 p.m. For more information call 508.487.1750 or visit paam.org.
