Editor’s note: This is part of an occasional series spotlighting the artists who shape 21st century culture in Colorado.
Ian Fisher’s commanding skyscapes evoke the full power of the natural universe, the ability of the troposphere to rumble and shake, to sack us with rain, blow us off our feet with wind and shock us with electricity, to take away our light and plunge us into darkness.
But he’s not about all that drama, to be honest. He sees his paintings, most often large canvases layered in oils, in more intimate terms. They are portraits, he says simply. But of clouds.
And so they do what portraits do. They give us surfaces and go below them and around them, and attempt to put their solitary subjects in context. If Joni Mitchell urged us to look at clouds from both sides, Fisher goes a bit farther. He wants us to see inside them, and to see through them.
For 16 years, he’s been painting clouds. Big, beautiful aerial views that stun viewers. That’s not hyperbole; sometimes I encounter a Fisher painting in a gallery or museum and I actually stop breathing for a moment. His skills have put him in the top tier of regional artists, both in terms of reputation and price point.
Fisher recently walked away willingly from his long-time representation at Robischon Gallery, easily Denver’s most prestigious contemporary dealer, because he no longer needs a middle man. Folks who buy and commission art find him on their own now.
Fisher’s focus is so pointed that people frequently refer to him as “the cloud painter” — which, for an artist, is both a good and bad thing. It’s swell to be known, but dangerous to be known for just one trick. But, after hundreds of canvases loaded up with stormy, swirling, gassy, crystalline scenes of darks and lights and every shade that mixing the two can muster, he remains compelled.
“You would have thought that I had this nailed by now,” he said in a recent interview, not even half-joking. “But they continue to reveal themselves. I’m still mining the territory.”
“It’s definitely not easy for me to make these paintings.”
He has gone through phases over the years. I’ve seen Ian Fisher paintings that look like realistic renderings of National Geographic magazine layouts, almost scientific in nature. But he’s also an abstractionist who feels free to take liberties with the reality before him. His paintings are fact-based fiction that usually start with the goal of recreating photographs he takes himself from rooftops or airplanes. Though they end up where they end up.
“It’s not so much about the content of the painting than it is about the painting itself,” he said.
“This is a nerdy painting thing to say, but when the painting starts to reveal itself and take over what it wants to be, instead of me trying to make it into something else, that is really exciting for me.”
That is nerdy, and a lot of painters and sculptors do say similar things, as if some spiritual force is taking over their hand as they work. As a critic, I often find it irritating; it rejects credit and assigns blame away from the artist.
But you can actually see that narrative unfold in Fisher’s paintings. He works back-to-front, layer on top of layer, cutting in sharp edges, dulling others in “a process of just adding and adding,” as he puts it.
He responds to the canvas — its size and shape and any paint applied to it — as much as he tries to create a recognizable setting. He offers this aphorism (and it explains a lot): “I think that every painting can be called abstraction and every painting can also be called representation to a certain degree.”
In that way, each piece feels like a journey — not just into the lower atmosphere but within the painting itself. Because they are often large — 6 feet square is not uncommon, and photos just can’t capture their breadth — they draw you in.
Adding to the adventure is the fact that Fisher paints in front of clouds rather than up to them. That is to say, he captures clouds as if he were standing before or beside them in the sky rather than gazing toward them from below, altering our usual perspective. He talks about ignoring the horizon line in his scenes, that painter’s trick that helps viewers understand how near or far away objects are in a landscape.
That adds a jet-plane dreaminess to his pictures, and an immediacy. Clouds, of course, are all immediacy; here one second, gone the next. There is an accuracy of spirit to these works, if not exactly a scientific authenticity to their formations.
Dreaminess isn’t everyone’s idea of great painting. Fisher’s work isn’t grounded in the real world. It doesn’t address politics or social issues and it certainly could. In an era of pressing environmental fears, there is plenty of opportunity to take a stand on issues, particularly if you are making pictures of the air we breathe and the sky we contaminate.
But that, he believes, would be unfair to the work. It would limit and confine it, perhaps even be selfish.
“I don’t want the painting to exist in a certain time necessarily and I don’t want the work to be just about something like global warming or wildfires, even though these things rest in my head constantly,” he said.
It’s an art-first, social issues-second type of mission. Fisher isn’t painting environmental strife; he is painting clouds. Clouds have no politics; they are ice particles floating in the air, not protesters marching in the streets.
“I would feel pressure to document that space instead of having the freedom to make a painting,” he said.
This is what makes them interesting. Few paintings manipulate my emotions the way Fisher’s cloud scenes do. They are melodrama.
But more than that, they really are portraits, loyal to the subject rather than their maker. Flights of fancy touching down in some ethereal truth.
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