Andrew Fish
Andrew Fish studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York and Middlebury College. He lives in Somerville, Massachusetts and exhibits in Boston, Washington, DC and New York.
As an artist I am interested in depicting and responding to my surroundings as a documenter of contemporary life. This may be oversimplifying my aim, but the business of making pictures has become so ubiquitous in our culture that examining it as a trend has become one of the primary focuses of my work.
The Information Age has inundated us with imagery like no other time in history. Through technology and social networking, people are exposed to an endless stream of imagery, manipulated or enhanced, and shared throughout the Internet. The question that comes to my mind is: How can a painter respond to, and find relevance in, this kind of environment?
As an artist living in an Instagram world, I react to the ephemeral nature of digital photography by celebrating its popular motifs and rejecting its immediacy. Although the themes and imagery of my works may sometimes be analogous to their digital counterparts, I engage in a process that requires longer meditation and traditional materiality to develop the image. I seek a painterly aesthetic but maintain the photographic visual language of a picture through calligraphic mark making. The end result is a tangible object that both embraces and rejects the relationship between today’s image creators and image viewers.