CICA Museum
August 11 – 15, 2021
The role of surface is essential to Jonathan Fisher’s work. He enjoys exploring texture as he admires the tactile experiences especially found in nature. In addition to acrylic paint, Jonathan Fisher adds acrylic modeling paste to my paints or apply it directly to the paper or canvas. Moving the combination across the surface yields beautiful moments of relief and surface texture. As layers are applied over time, paint settles into these relief areas and adds character to the work that he never could’ve replicated simply with a brush.
Jonathan Fisher finds nature, landscapes and biological forms such as cells and microbes fascinating. These items make up our living environment, providing us with both safety and danger. Overall, he’s inspired by the structures of the many surfaces that we touch with our hands or comprehend from under a microscope. He finds beauty in pondering entities that are smaller or larger than us, beyond our comprehension, including the sublime, the celestial or the microscopic.
To Jonathan Fisher, abstraction is that conduit between representational reality and imagination. Hisy abstract work exists in the language of dreams, fuzzy memories or selective sharing of emotions. While the content of his work may allude to planets in the solar system, map structures, bacteria under a microscope or even bubbles from running water, the imagery is never depicting a real moment, but the imagined moment. He likes to generate a feeling or impression while suggesting anonymity of the source subject matter. The imagined content of his work seeks to visually live in those moments before we drift to sleep or awake when our minds are flush with color, figurative distortions or feelings that have no distinctive form in our physical world.
Jonathan Fisher resides in Atlanta, Georgia, USA and serve as the Studio Foundations Coordinator and Assistant Professor of Art at Kennesaw State University. Originally from western North Carolina,he earned his BFA in Art from The University of North Carolina at Asheville and my MFA in Art from Ohio State University. Jonathan Fisher’s work is found in collections at both Ohio State, UNC-Asheville as well as Catawba Science Center in Hickory, North Carolina and the City of Decatur, Georgia. He has exhibited nationally in the US and also participated in juried exhibitions in the countries of Canada, Denmark and South Korea.
