Brian Fisher Print, Paint and Sculpture Blog

The world turns.  It’s a fact.  I first witnessed the proof on a black and white Zenith TV.  A peg legged modern marvel and the centerpiece of my Middle-American living room.  The date was 1969 and US Apollo Mission Eleven had just landed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin upon Earth’s moon.  There for all to see from a totally new perspective was Earth, our (black and white) home, spinning in space. Untangling my thoughts to blog about a video and TV cabinet I made for a friend and patron has been difficult.  Telamones was designed to conceal (and reveal) a flat screen TV.   In the process of creating the cabinet I thought  about many things relating to TV and how historically the information we receive informs and shapes our perceptions.  In each epoch our worldview is framed by technological advances and of course the culture  into which each new technology is born. My father told me he first saw a “murky” television image in 1932 at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas. 

And so, the world turns . In archaic Greek cosmological explanations of the heavens the Telamones became one and and the one was Atlas . Described as the sufferer or bearer of the heavens, Atlas was a second generation Titan. His brothers, Prometheus, Epimetheus, and Menoitios were all sons of Iapetos and Asia, or perhaps Iapetos and Klymene. Homer, in the Odyssey, writes,"Atlas the baleful, (oloophron); knows the depths of all the seas, and he, no other, guards (or holds) the tall pillars that keep the sky and earth apart." After Atlas leads a failed revolt against the Olympian gods Zeus condemns him to this fate and he becomes the one who turns the heavens on their axis, causing the stars to revolve.  I have been playing with compositions for digital prints with Atlas as subject.  Above is an example.

I am making progress on Telamones , the video cabinet commission, and presently working out the painted pattern that will be applied to the outside. I still need to give it another coat of gesso before I begin transferring the pattern and painting. The specifications changed from a wall mounted flat screen to one that sits on a table and so the design also changed to accommodate the base that is part of the flat screen video and a roof element to visually balance the base. I think it is starting to look pretty fun.

I have been listening to Galileo's Daughter by Dava Sobel as I work on a new comission. The book is constructed around letters from his daughter Sour Maria Celeste and is about Galileo Galilei's life as the foremost Italian scholar of the seventeenth century, his earth shaking discoveries, all framed by his eventual clash with Catholic doctrine. I am often drawn to the investigation of definition as subject or the edges of redefinition. The place where one myth is replaced by another or the explanation that reflects current discovery and the truths of a new epoch take hold. The science and art of Italy in the seventeenth century were all about new truths and redefinition of the accepted truth. While listening to Galileo's Daughter I have been working on several images and a commission who's subject is “Pillars of the World.” These originally began with a Monotype print titled Telamones. Telamones are the male equivalent of the female Caryatids