Laurie Fisher Answers "4 Questions"
1. Your stories/memories are personal. What do you think about viewers
bringing their own interpretation to your paintings?
It’s inevitable, and all part of the experience of art. Everything we see is interpreted personally though our own human lens that is all of our own personal experiences and preferences. It’s an inescapable and beautiful part of the life of a painting. If my painting has stirred a spark of aliveness in someone else, that’s magic.
2. How do you overcome creative blocks?
I paint. I get my hands back in the materials and start making. The blocks tend to come mostly when I’m away from the work, when I’m trying to paint “in my head” which doesn’t work. Even knowing this, I still try! And the result is usually a building frustration, because it doesn’t work like that at all for me. I need the physicality of painting, the gooey paint itself, the colors, the smells, and the tactile experience of working with the materials to tap into the expansive, non-linear part of me that creates. It’s like life, my brain can’t know or predict or plan how a painting is going to unfold, My work is actually all about being free enough to work from that unknowable intuition that doesn’t come from the brain at all. If I’m blocked while I’m actually painting, sometimes just browsing through my own paints and materials, or turning to simpler color studies can also get me out of my head. Often one color will just leap out at me and change all the work in my studio.
3. What is your biggest inspiration?
Color itself. For as long as I can remember, color has sparked a feeling of aliveness beyond words. Being outside on this beautiful planet too, but perhaps that’s more of the same, as nature is the true source of color. I’m also in awe of my daughters, who are now all young adults. Just being the sidelines observing them navigate through their lives inspires me to keep things simple, to love, and to seek our own personal aliveness, and there rest will fill in around us. I learn so much from them.
4. How does your art affect other aspects of your life?
Painting is a part of a lifelong call in me to make things. And an obsessive attraction to color and beautiful objects. It’s always been true, and it just feels like a piece of me, There is no aspect of my life that is separate from making and creating. My intention in my art and in my life are the same — is to get as near as possible to my truest, simplest, most undefined self, and paint and live from there.
Learn more about this artist: