Gary Fisher started painting as a hobby while practicing law with the U.S. Justice Department where he was an environmental enforcement attorney. Having more fun painting than lawyering, Gary left the legal profession and now devotes himself full time to art, painting in Washington, DC and Rehoboth Beach, Delaware and serving as the art director of The Results Galleries in the Results the Gym locations. Gary is currently serving as Counsel for the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation where he supplements his passion for art with his continued passion for environmental and conservation issues. Most of Gary's abstracts and landscapes, as well as his fanciful paintings of fruit and garden flowers, are displayed in bright bold striking purples, yellows and blues.

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 nation's capital in the summer of 2002 as part of the 'Party Animals' exhibition. He also decorated one of the dolphin’s on display in the summer of 2003 as part of Rehoboth Beach’s ‘Dolphins Around Town Project’. In addition, two of Gary's abstract landscapes were included in the U.S. State Department Art in Embassies Program and were displayed in the U.S. Embassy in Port Au Prince, Haiti from 2000 until the fall of 2001. Many of Gary's 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 retailer’s Chevy Chase, Maryland store.

Gary has participated in numerous Washington, DC art exhibitions including shows sponsored by the Corcoran Gallery of Art Alternative Space, the Rivaga Gallery, the Wilson Art Center Gallery, Children’s National Hospital, Alero Reastaurant and The Source Theatre. He has also donated works to help raise money for such charitable organizations as Food & Friends, GLAAD, the Washington Gay Men's Chorus, the Victory Fund, D.C. Appleseed and Delaware's Sundance benefit. A native of Wyoming, Gary enjoys his summers in Rehoboth Beach, where he has had solo art shows at the Blue Moon, Dos Locos, and Peninsula Gallery in Lewes, Delaware. He enjoys world travel, which often serves as an inspiration for his art.

ARTIST STATEMENT

When I produce a painting that allows others to see the beauty that I see in the world around me – from the mundane to the profound and complex – I feel a surge of happiness.  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.