Fisher Girl 1907

Harrison Fisher made this, Fisher Girl, in watercolor, and I can imagine him there in his studio, loose brush in hand. It looks like he’s playing with the wetness of the medium. See the watery washes of color, particularly in the big hat that almost seems to swim above her head? I sympathize with Fisher here—he’s grappling with the age-old problem of how to capture likeness and feeling with such fluidity. The marks are so ephemeral, yet they coalesce into a portrait, a moment captured. The texture of the paper peeks through the thin layers of paint, adding a kind of breathiness to the image. It’s a light touch. There’s a kinship here with other painters who embraced the accidents of their medium, and you know, maybe we’re all just constantly reinterpreting the same eternal themes, just with different tools. Painting is like this ongoing conversation across time, where each artist borrows and riffs off of what came before. It is such an embodied expression, it embraces ambiguity, like a good poem.