Matthew F Fisher

“Are there particular motivations behind your use of the colour pink?”

It’s hard to make rose and blue paintings without thinking of Picasso’s masterful work from 1901-07. The oldest work here, The Rose of Nowhere, was created during my residence at Yaddo in 2015. While there, I made eight paintings in total. In order to break up all the blue paintings, I wanted to make a work as opposite as I could color-wise. Pink was the perfect answer and I followed my artistic gut. The works from 2016 have a personal secondary reading, as my wife and I experienced the awe of our first pregnancy, we chose to not find out the sex of our baby. During this time, I consciously made works exclusively in blue and pink as an awe to that unknown and to play up the stereotypical color choices of associated with gender.

“What do you associate with the colour pink when you apply it to your practice?”

It’s a powerful color. As a child the sight of pink made me dizzy. Now that I am older, I find it the most beautiful color, artificial, mysterious, unknown, in nature. When used for sunsets, it feels like the magic second of the magic hour. When the light enters your eyes and fills the inside of your skull with colors. It’s a way to paint the most natural of subjects, the landscape, in an other worldly way.

“Do you agree that in art the shade pink can be used as a tool to subvert and distort its traditional cultural associations?”

When a constant is known, pink equals femininity, it becomes more interesting to invert that structure and play it against itself. After awhile, that too becomes known. To then bend it back towards the original stance but allow it to stay in the middle, where it can be one, the other, both, or neither creates a more complex reading of the work.