Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2011
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 31:4 (Fall 2011).
Abstract
Internationally acclaimed artist Vernon Fisher is known for making paintings that contain complex, and frequently competing, renderings of the world. His carefully crafted art is crowded with stylistically variant depictions of colonial maps, portraits of classic movie stars, and cartoon drawings of Mickey Mouse. The arrangement of such disparate imagery within discrete paintings encourages the viewer of Fisher's art to make comparisons between the different subjects portrayed. Reconciling the often discordant narrative implications remains an enduring entertainment of Fisher's work.
A long-time resident of Fort Worth, Texas, the artist creates his paintings by co-opting and manipulating images he considers slightly exotic. This is due, in part, to his upbringing in a small Texas town-which Fisher describes as an experience that was transcribed by what one could see, or what one could find in an encyclopedia. Not surprisingly, his art, documented in this handsome monograph, reveals the artist's thematic fixation on Texas vistas and 1950s photographs culled from World Book Encyclopedias.
Comments
Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.