Brian Fisher Print, Paint and Sculpture Blog

This is "Omphalos", a Rust Monoprint with Gold Leaf, mounted to a coped dimensional panel.  It's dimensions are approximately 36 x 36 x 1 3/4 inches.  I made it by rusting a water-jet cut Cort-en steel plate onto/into an antique linen tablecloth. Omphalos means navel, as in belly button, (umbilicus in Latin) and it also means "The Center."  The Omphalos Stone at the Temple of Apollo in Delphi Greece marked the center of the old Greek world. Each culture has its recognized center.  Sometimes more than one. For instance, the USA's political Omphalos would be the White House in Washington DC and cultural center might perhaps be Rockefeller Center in New York City (or not).  In every culture it depends on who's telling the story! If you would like to see "Omphalos," the current center of my world, please visit the annual Seattle Print Arts Members Exhibition, Pressing On, with an opening reception today, Thursday, November 17th,  5-8 pm, a

This year I have been printing about, painting, carving and thinking about "center" as concept and source for imagery.  This is not a new subject for me to explore but a recognition that all of the stories I am drawn to, make art about, have at core the search for center.  Within mythic story, center is generally a tribally circumscribed place, a point of connection between sky and earth where cardinal directions meet.  Whether that center be Delphi or Delos, the Temple Mount or the Black Hills, it is the same symbolic center.  It might be called Omphalos or Axis Mundi, Bindu or Bethyle  but details and superficial observations aside it functions as the still point from which all objective reality is a manifestation. Spiritually it is the point we search from and for which we search. My image “Center” is a mixed media bas-relief, 13 x 10 in.