Brian Fisher Print, Paint and Sculpture Blog

The 22nd Annual Vashon Island Garden Tour, Saturday June 23, and Sunday, June 24, 10 am to 5 pm, is an offering of five unique gardens with features that will delight your senses.  Read all about the tour here: Vashon Garden Tour. I will be showing and selling my art cards and cut steel “Threshold Guardians,” garden art personifying myth and boundaries, at the Garden Art Market during the tour.  The image above featuring Zeus as a black swan is a sample of my “Guardian” garden stakes. The Garden Art Market is open to the public 10 am to 5 pm both Saturday and Sunday.  You will find the market conveniently located mid island on Vashon Hwy. and on the former K2 building front lawn.  The Garden Market will feature 20 artists, food and musical entertainment.  I will see you there rain or shine!

A ll afternoon I have been working outside on my Threshold Guardians, (garden stakes and garden art personifying adventure, edges and boundaries), preparing them for primer and paint in colors that compliment the Northwest garden pallet and also reflect the colors I find particularly appealing when I print.  As the sun was setting and after I had wrapped everything, I was amazed to see the silhouettes that began to appear through the plastic bags that had been slipped over everything to protect the cut steel art from rain and our seasonal Alder pollen.   Of course I went looking for my camera! I found the photos wonderfully mysterious. You can see all of my cut steel Threshold Guardians during the Vashon Island Spring Studio Tour, the first two weekends of May.  http://vashonislandartstudiotour.com/Spring2012/

The Spring 2012 Vashon Island Art Studio Tour Brochurs have arrived and the online Vashon Island Art Tour web link has been launched.  Thank you Sy and Ric of Novak Creative, Inc., and Jan Wall, our outstanding, indefatigable, indomitable, coordinator and leader of many, many successful Vashon Island Art Studio Tours.   Thank you everyone who have been involved in making the Vashon Island Art Tour- Beautiful! Findable!  Possible!  I hope that it is a successful Art Studio Tour for artists and patrons alike.  Preview it now!  http://vashonislandartstudiotour.com/Spring2012/

The symbol often is more potent than the thing itself.  Through distillation Symbol can appear to become the thing itself.  I try to approach my art in that way.  A reduction and simplification of shape that still has meaning and still tells story. Wallace Stephens did it with words.  He says this poem is not an idea about a thing but the thing itself.  However it is his reality and his presentation of the thing itself.  It is still his idea.  In this poem he explores the nature of reality and is searching for the recognizable in the unknowable. "Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself." At the earliest ending of winter, In March, a scrawny cry from outside Seemed like a sound in his mind. He knew that he heard it, A bird's cry, at daylight or before, In the early March wind. The sun was rising at six, No longer a battered panache above snow... It would have been outside. It was not from the vast ventriloquism Of sleep's faded papier-m