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 on Vashon founded by Valerie Wilson in the early 1990s — 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.