Painting it out
For Andrew Fish, making "Fire Pit" was an act of creation as release.
Andrew Fish’s paintings beckon us into the slippery netherworld between narrative and abstraction. Viewing them is like looking at a familiar scene through a prism, in which more than just light refracts. Story and form bend and dart, shadows smudge, and color bleeds, leaving great pockets for us to reach into with our own memories and associations. They sweep away the guardrails around what feels potently familiar and hurtle us toward something pungent but intangible: An inkling, a perception, a love, a fear.
Andrew’s paintings have some roots in his life. The photographs he takes, as he explains below, have similar resonance, striking different chords of life passages and personal connections. Some stir tenderness. Some hurt outright. Painting, in the case of Fire Pit, one of the works he writes about below, becomes an opportunity to revisit a recent loss and begin to come to terms with it.
Letting go takes time. Rather than dwelling on the story of what happened, moving the process wordlessly through materials or rituals helps – shining a light on pain through the work of the hands and eyes. A few months after a breakup several years ago, I went to the beach at low tide and molded a sand sculpture of my ex along the waterline. I left feeling lighter and more circumspect, knowing the waters would rise and wash him away. For me, it was a ritual of water and earth; for Andrew, color, paint, and fire. I love how in the painting, the great white slash down the middle, which the unknowing artist introduced as a formal obstacle, turned into the work’s eruptive central architecture. What started as an obstacle transformed into a light source. I’m going to take that as a metaphor for life.
The painter has a lot going on right now, with work in Dreamscape at Savage Godfrey Gallery in Norwell through April 5. He’s in the upcoming group shows Chroma Zone at Blue Triangle Gallery Feb. 20-May 1, and Inside the Artist’s Studio: Exploring the Creative Life at Brickbottom Gallery March 6-April 5. The two works Andrew writes about here, Fire Pit and Three Men in a Tub, will be in the Blue Triangle exhibition.
Andrew writes:
