Emma Fisher Somerset, United Kingdom
I am a painter based in Bath and have been painting for over 30 years.
Painting is how I interpret the vicissitudes of my life. The experiences that shape a human life include many things from deep tragedy to joyful moments but there can be an ongoing relentlessness in our day to day experience, especially as a woman in the 21st C; a wife and mother and it is through my painting that I seek to explore my response and reaction to aspects of my life. I choose to locate my paintings in a place that does not exist but is informed by the natural world and my domestic environment, as it helps me to process whilst visually creating a contextual familiarity that provides comfort. The narrative, emotion or feeling I am exploring drives the image making and it is always autobiographical. I like to use plant forms, drawn from aspects of the landscape, together with domestic objects, drawn from my home environment, as visual props for a narrative that drives the image making, this narrative is never disclosed but only suggested in the titles. The choice of objects has a personal resonance with a particular time, place or person, these props retain an underlying sense of their original function but are usually playing out a drama that can then be applicable to a variety of meanings, intended or accidental. This approach often produces many iterations of an idea in my sketchbook before I commit the imagery to a finished work. The visual research will involve drawing to record information both from the landscape and other sources and then a playful exploration of composition and colour palette will end up in a partially resolved idea that I can take to the canvas. Then I can play with the visual balance between representation and abstract mark-making and this is what excites me, in the outcome it is often the representation that dominates but I am constantly striving to bring it back to the more abstract and essential elements of the mark-making, composition and colour. As an Artist who grew up in Devon, the natural world around me has been an enduring feature of my life. I am now lucky enough to live on the edge of the Cotswolds and this environment informs the work that I make every day. Whilst I am not a ‘landscape painter’ in a traditional sense, the constant presence of the natural environment is the pictorial world that my paintings inhabit, informing my work through the visual language of the paintings, both in a representational way and in how the texture and surface of the environment inform the mark making within my painting, there is a dialogue between my lived experience of the landscape and the staged worlds I create.
