Gary Fisher is a Washington DC artist, attorney and local businessman. Since retirement from the United States Department of Justice in 2000, where he was a Senior environmental enforcement attorney, he has pursued a second career as a professional artist, served as a Counsel for Child Abuse and Neglect for the DC Superior Court and as Counsel at the National Fish & Wildlife Foundation.

He is one on of the founding members of the dynamic Mid-City Artists Group in Washington, serves as the Art Director of The Results Galleries in the Results the Gym locations, and is a graduate of the Vander Zee School of Painting.

Gary was selected by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities to
decorate one of 200 donkey and elephant sculptures, which were on display throughout the nation¹s capital in the summer of 2002 as part of the ³Party Animals² exhibition. He also decorated one of the dolphins on display in the summer of 2003 as part of Rehoboth Beach Delaware¹s ³Dolphins Around Town Project². In addition, Gary¹s abstract landscapes have been included in the U.S. State Department Art in Embassies Program and displayed in United States foreign embassies. Many of Gary¹s other oils, acrylics and pastels hang in
Washington, DC businesses and government offices, as well as in the homes of art collectors and friends around the world. He was one of two local artists to be showcased by Saks Fifth Avenue in 2002 with a major exhibition of his art in the windows of the retailer¹s Chevy Chase, Maryland store.

Gary has participated in numerous Washington, DC art exhibitions including exhibitions at the Vander Zee Gallery, Gallery Plan B, the Studio Gallery, Art 17, the Peninsula Gallery in Lewes, Delaware and the Philip Morton Gallery in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He regularly donates works to help raise money for such charitable organizations as Food & Friends, GLAAD, the Washington Gay Men¹s Chorus, the Victory Fund, D.C. Appleseed and Delaware¹s Camp Rehoboth and the Children's National Hospital. Gary enjoys his summers in Rehoboth Beach, where he is represented by the Philip Morton Gallery and also shows his work regularly at The Blue Moon.

.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I feel a surge of happiness when I produce paintings that lead others to glimpse the kind of beauty that I find in the mundane, profound, and complex world around me.  The act of painting relaxes, refreshes, and nourishes me. The process of painting – the act of mixing colors, applying them with different brushes, fingers, and toes on canvas or paper – stirs something deep within me and provides a tremendous sense of satisfaction.

One of our great American Art Teachers, Charles Hawthorne, best describes how I feel when he wrote, “Our job is to be an artist, which is to be a poet, a preacher if you will, to be of some use in the world by adding to the sum total of beauty in it. We like to do it… a painter goes out not because he wants to paint a picture, but because of the beauty and comparison of one spot of color with another, not a literary beauty, but beauty because it stirs him – an excitement, an aesthetic emotion!”

In my paintings, I am not concerned about subtexts or hidden meaning. Really, in my work, what you see is what you get; an unadulterated love of the play of paint against the canvas. I use color as it comes to me – unhindered, unfettered – allowing it to flow from the palette to the canvas with the ease of the simple choice that I make in the moment. I believe that this gives my paintings a joyful, spontaneous feeling that adds to the energy and liveliness of the surface. My hope is that each viewer who stands in front of my painting can immerse themselves in the energy of happiness that I feel as I paint it.