BY NORM POWERS
PHOTOS BY MATT ROSE
Teasing out the mysteries and puzzles embedded in works of art has kept critics busy and museums filled for hundreds of years. Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code, persuaded public audiences that a painting is more than it seems, a coded message from the artist and a challenge to the viewer to find the solution.
Famed abstract expressionist Mark Rothko admitted as much by observing that artists employ certain images because "they are the eternal symbols upon which we must fall back to express basic psychological ideas."
This may not have consciously occurred to Asheville artist Barbara Fisher, but her narrative landscapes and compartmentalized collections of objects are rich with images and icons laden with inner meaning. "The iconic forms develop as I work and there is certainly a strong intuitive pull towards certain images," Barbara says. "I tell people I just paint what I see, which is true — it’s just that I look inward rather than outside myself."
A mostly self-taught artist who moved to Asheville’s River District from San Francisco, Barbara’s signature works feature anything from whimsically drawn pocketbooks and shirts to mysterious geological and floral shapes, each image occupying a square in a Barbara’s trademark grid pattern, which itself creates a relationship between otherwise unrelated objects. "The paintings could be seen as, say, 12 individual panels in a narrative or storyboard, or as random thoughts," Barbara says, "the way we experience stream of consciousness thinking, our mind jumping from one thing to the next, usually quite unpredictably."
Random they may be, but the arrangement of images in Barbara’s work demands an introspective eye. Consider
"A lot of my forms are symbols of the self," Barbara says, "houses, purses, vessels, suitcases — things with hidden interiors. I find people feel a resonance with these simplified images, even if they often can’t say why."
Cultural references abound, too — a reflection of Barbara’s extensive traveling and affinity for sacred spaces of many traditions, from the botanical motifs of Etruscan painted tombs to the arches and spires of temples, mosques and churches. She has most recently been drawn to Turkish iconography, apparent in the selection of one of her paintings for the cover of Turkish author Yesho Atil’s
Each of her mixed-media pieces is built on a ground composed of bits of paper that Barbara collects, anything from wallpaper to music scores, on top of which she creates an acrylic-based, sealed texture for her images, which are applied in oil. "It’s a labor-intensive process that gives each piece a history," she says, "which hopefully adds to its mystery and allows people to spend a long time looking."
Barbara’s work is indeed deceptively simple: the familiar rectangles, circles and triangles of grade school art evoke memories of childhood, home and beneficent nature.
Traveling. As the eye reads the grid from right to left, the viewer alternately encounters a bottle with a bone inside it, chalice-like containers, a pocketbook and a labyrinth spiraling inward, sprinkled among other drawings that are like mini-landscapes — bare trees on a hill, a sun (or perhaps it’s a moon) rising over (or setting behind) a sloping terrain, pennant-like structures sprouting out of the ground. It’s as if, in the painting’s 11 little squares, a kind of cosmic recycling is taking place, a deeply interior space emerging into the light of day, only to subside again, hidden and unexpressed. On Freedom Street, published this spring by Eastern Washington University Press.Train Of Thought even includes a toy train and a tiny sailboat braving a tempestuous sea — the playthings of youthful imagination. "I’m a big believer in synchronicity and in the universal appeal of certain forms and subject matter," Barbara says. "I often have the experience of finding one of my forms in a primitive work of art that I might see in a museum or book." 