Cage, 78 2009 Oil on Linen 51" x 40"

Seeking inspiration for her upcoming show at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, LA-based painter Kim Fisher paid a visit to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History's internationally recognized Mollusk Collection and Research Center. Fisher avers that while seashell collecting is not a real hobby of hers, her 2007 painting Seashell evolved from a drawing that she made as an exploration of a broken shell she found on a New Zealand beach. In her Highland Park studio, she describes its shape with her hands. "You could see inside it, into all the weird chambers. It's such a thick, calcium-rich thing, you'd think that it would take hundreds of years to form, but it just works its magic." The shell worked magic on Fisher too, as she broke its articulated patterns down over and over again to reveal a spiraling abstract composition.

Though Fisher's MFA from Otis is in painting, her undergraduate background in sculpture is evident even in her current work. She says, "My paintings have always been these physical things and not just pictures of things. The physicality of the painting has always been important for me." The excess material around the edges of Fisher's large-scale paintings, as well as their heavily textured surfaces, all attest to this longstanding interest. A series she began in 2001 was inspired by gemstones, precious objects which Fisher likens to the qualities of a painting. There are similarities, she explains, "in terms of color and light, or the way a stone is cut and arranged to show off its best qualities." This series led her to her experiment with stretching the linen in different directions in order to make her brushstrokes respond to the gemstone's cut. However, she insists her paintings are not just simple translations of objects from three into two dimensions. "I describe it as the painting and this other thing sort of meeting halfway. It's not like when you look at these paintings you say, "Oh, this is a picture of a gemstone." Instead, you might say, "This is a painting that has qualities like a gemstone." The painting is a dialogue about these two objects; it's definitely not photorealistic."

Fisher works first in drawing, then tests her colors in small collages cut from the glossy pages of fashion magazines. The small drawings and collages are then mapped onto large sheets which Fisher uses to transfer the grid of the painting onto linen. Using blue painter's tape, Fisher blocks off the bare linen and in-paints individual shapes, then covers up the dry, finished areas with precisely cut pieces from the map.

When Fisher first started painting during her final year as an undergrad at UCLA, she worked only in monochrome and the form continues to influence her work. An ink-black square is at the heart of one of her new compositions. Unlike her early monochromes, this one bears a crown of deep violet and mottled black and white oblong shapes, which spill onto the excess material unfolding beyond the edge of the linen. Fisher explains that this piece is a visual description of "emptying out the square," an ode to the process of making a monochrome canvas. These pieces are also influenced by a curious shell that Fisher encountered at the Museum of Natural History. The fragile shells, like a blank canvas, accumulate other, stronger shells for protection as they travel through the ocean. Many of Fisher's paintings are doubly inspired in this way, motivated both by an interest in the original object and in the process of painting.

Her new work, on view this fall at the Contemporary Arts Forum, will continue this inquiry, inviting viewers to consider the objecthood of paintings by making visible this "dialogue," as Fisher describes it, between the object and its painted representation.