Lindsey Fisher was born in 1956 near Appomattox, Virginia. His family later moved to Charleston, South Carolina where the young artist’s talent was recognized and cultivated early on. As a youth he apprenticed with the painter Charles Statts at the College of Charleston and later attended Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, where he studied classical landscape and figure painting. It was while at Ringling that he apprenticed with Thornton Utz, a fine art portraitist.
In 1976, he was awarded a scholarship to study at The Art Students League in New York City where he studied painting and drawing with such influential artists such as Vaclav Vytlacil, Joseph Stapleton and Bruce Dorfman.
In 1978, he began working at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of Paper Conservation where he had unprecedented access to the vast collections of the museum’s paintings, prints and drawings. During this time he met John Caldwell, then associate curator for the newly opened American Wing at the museum. It was through Caldwell that Fisher gained access to rarely seen works of the Hudson River School and the American Luminist Movement. A life long supporter of Fisher’s work, Caldwell later went on to become art critic of The New York Times and then curator of both The Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania the San Francisco Museum of Art.
The 1980’s brought both sociological and cultural tumult to the arts in New York and Fisher’s ideas evolved from purely landscape oriented motifs to a series of works involving photographs, xerox images and selected art historical texts which explored the interrelationships of language and perception and their connection to both landscape and memory. In what he saw as a natural extension of these efforts, Fisher began working in collage, often including the discarded detritus of the City’s sidewalks in his work. His later collages were influenced by Joseph Stella, Kurt Schwitters and Joseph Cornell.
In the late 1980’s, Fisher shifted his primary focus to public arts administration when he was offered a position with The Art Commission and the Mayor’s Office of The City of New York where he played an important role in developing guidelines for maintaining and preserving the City’s vast collection of Public Art. It was during this period that Fisher was also involved in the design review of hundreds of city-funded art and architectural programs throughout the City, as well as revising the city charter which determined how New York City acquires and maintains its art collections, and also served as Director of the Tweed Gallery, the city’s mayoral exhibition space. In 1986, he was the Mayor’s Office cultural liaison to the French Ministry of Culture during the Statue of Liberty Centennial Celebration.
His experience at the Mayor’s office proved invaluable and provided access to numerous international cultural events. In 1987, Fisher moved to France with the intention of returning to his own creative work full time, while also working as consultant to the American Chamber of Commerce in France, and the Cities of Bordeaux and Toulouse in developing guidelines for corporate support for the arts. A decade of involvement in the cultural life of New York had honed Fisher’s deep fascination with the perception and manipulation of language and evoked newfound interest in exploring these themes creatively and considered a move to France would be at once exhilarating and daunting in its linguistic challenges. Speaking no French required him to return to rudimentary means of communication where the rigors of expressing basic needs provided new creative impetus to his work.
Following the devastation of Hurricane Hugo in 1989, Fisher returned briefly to Charleston with the intent of rebuilding the past. It was a harrowing experience touring the storm-ravaged landscapes of the South Carolina low country and witnessing the destruction of his childhood home. On the global scene, the collapse of the Soviet empire and the fall of the Berlin wall was changing the political and cultural climate of both Europe and the United States. Fisher had long suspected that contemporary modern art no longer served the progressive tenets that it espoused and that these new events were concurrent with the emasculation of a tottering New York art market. This growing doubt t provoked a profound reassessment of his creative direction and a desire to return to an approach which was more direct and visceral in its connection to nature.
September 11, 2001 was a defining moment for Fisher when life for him and his fellow New Yorkers changed forever. His was an immediate and singular experience as the events of 9/11 moved towards their horrific and fatal conclusion. Fisher captured images of the final collapse of the World Trade Towers, an experience that was to profoundly affect him both personally and creatively. The apparent irrelevance of contemporary art in the face of these events compelled Fisher to return to his earlier attempts to capture what he had always seen as a unique yet primal power that landscape held over our imagination. It was during this period that Fisher began taking photographs exclusively. Fusing both the classic and modern, he was at the forefront in adopting digital photography format as his primary medium of expression. Working with a digital camera brought a new level of immediacy to his work.
In the tradition of American and classical European landscape painters such as Winslow Homer, Thomas Cole, Andrew Wyeth, William M. Turner, and Caspar David Freidrich, Fisher’s work captures nature’s sublime force and power, evoking through his works “That wind, a silent current, that moves across America, part of the strain and culture of America that propelled such men as Eakins, Bellows, Homer, and Whistler and all those who record its passing”
Lindsey Fisher Photography 