Brian
Fisher

Brian Fisher was born in 1956 in Atwood, Kansas, and earned a BA in Interior Architecture from the College of Architecture and Design at Kansas State University, graduating in 1980. He has lived and made art on Vashon Island, Washington, since 1989. In 1997 he joined Quartermaster Press — the print cooperative founded on Vashon by Valerie Wilson — and began working with a press for the first time. The encounter was decisive. From that point, all of his work — print, oil on canvas, assemblage, sculpture — has been organized around or informed by the logic of monotype. He is a past president of VIVA (Vashon Island Visual Artists) and a founding member of Swiftwater Gallery. He is also a partner of Presentation Arts, an architectural illustration firm.

Monotype is a medium with a long relationship to myth: Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, who invented the process in the 1640s, used it primarily for religious and mythological subjects; Degas, who revived it two centuries later, pushed it toward the spontaneous and the fugitive; the MoMA’s permanent collection traces a lineage from Degas through Prendergast, Picasso, and Elizabeth Peyton. Fisher works in that tradition — the unrepeatable single impression, the ink distributed by hand and run through the press, the result carrying the physical evidence of every decision made in the making. His subjects are Greek and Roman myth, Sumerian and Mesopotamian epic, ancient cities: Janus, Faunus, Mnemosyne, The Trojan Horse, Hylas and Hercules, Nineveh, Babylon, Damascus. His “Magic Carpet Ride” series collages cut monotype prints into compositions referencing the ancient cities of the Near East — one version of Nineveh incorporates 24-karat gold. In The Pearl Divers, The bold black contour lines define two stylized figures against a densely patterned ground of rust, turquoise, and sage, where the monotype's characteristic one-off printing creates irregular color bleeding at the edges—softer and more accidental than the crisp, deliberate ink outline. The underlying paper texture shows through the thin translucent washes, while the gestural marks (the X's and cross-hatching on the swimmers' bodies) sit flatly atop rather than into the surface, distinguishing the drawn annotation from the printed base. Fisher flattens mythological labor into pure geometric abstraction, stripping the pearl diver narrative of romance to expose it as repetitive bodily geometry—limbs reduced to angles, the figure as a machine for extraction rather than a hero's quest. In The Bull of Heaven, The monotype's irregular burnt-orange wash creates a mottled ground across cream paper, while bold black linear figures—rendered with the fluid confidence of drawing rather than the deliberate pressure of painting—float across this stained surface with gestural ease. Fisher's ink lines vary in density and weight, sometimes feathering at their edges where the monotype plate's surface broke the pigment's adhesion, a quality fundamentally different from the controlled consistency of painted marks. The technique collapses classical mythology into graphic shorthand: angular, almost primitive figures enact divine violence on a ground that feels simultaneously aged and freshly stained, suggesting the mythic past as something weathered yet urgently immediate rather than distant or transcendent. In Angel of Strength, The composition stages a geometric confrontation: a black triangular form bisects the composition vertically while a central vertical axis of stacked color—red, blue, yellow, red—creates a tense symmetry against acid-yellow backgrounds rendered in dense, repetitive linear marks. The monotype's characteristic irregularity appears in the varied ink saturation and the way pigment pooled unevenly across the surface, producing mottled transitions that resist the crisp geometry of the painted black lines and colored zones. Fisher deploys the print medium's accident-prone nature against geometry itself, letting viscosity and pressure create texture where design demands flatness. By rendering an angelic or heroic figure as pure abstraction—circles and stripes rather than musculature—the work evacuates mythology of its human drama, proposing that "strength" resides in structural coherence rather than narrative embodiment. The architecture training is legible in the work — these are compositions that think structurally, that understand mass and void, that use the press as a kind of load-bearing argument.

He is a member of Seattle Print Arts and has taught monotype workshops at his studio. He has shown in solo and group exhibitions throughout the Pacific Northwest, and co-curated the Quartermaster Press 25th Anniversary Retrospective at Vashon Center for the Arts in 2018 — an exhibition of 75-plus prints by 31 artists. A sharper critical observation: Fisher is doing something unusual in contemporary American printmaking. He is not using myth as decoration or as a shorthand for grandeur. He is using it the way the Sumerians used it — as a framework for thinking about what it means to be alive now.

The art I make begins as story. It is the story and research around its subject that inspires and is with me as I make images. My interpretation of the myth and telling of the story is informed by print process and evolves in the attendant dance of knife with paper, ink with plate, paper and plate with press. When method and material bond under pressure, the unique result embodies the thoughtfulness that is story and the dance that was process.