ARTIST STATEMENT:
What starts as an experience of a particular environment — a hillside, a room, a passage of light, a fleeting encounter — becomes abstracted through layers of color, gesture, and revision until the original image dissolves into something more psychological than representational.
I’m interested in the tension between structure and instability: the ways we organize experience while memory continually shifts, obscures, and reconstructs it. Lines emerge and disappear, forms compress and open, fragments of landscape become traces of presence or emotional residue. The paintings occupy a space between containment and release, recognition and ambiguity.
My background in interior design strongly informs how I think about composition, proportion, movement, and the emotional qualities of space. I’m attentive to how color carries weight, how the eye moves through a surface, and how areas of tension and quiet coexist within a painting. The process itself is intuitive and accumulative — built through layering, disruption, erasure, and reconstruction.
Rather than documenting specific places, I’m trying to hold onto the feeling of inhabiting them: the fleeting intersections of memory, atmosphere, and emotional experience that remain just beneath the surface.
ARTIST BIO:
Maureen Fisher is a Los Angeles–based artist whose abstract paintings explore the intersection of memory, place, and interior space. Working in layered fields of color, gesture, and texture, her paintings begin with lived experience — fragments of landscape, architecture, travel, atmosphere, and emotional memory — and evolve through an intuitive process of accumulation, disruption, and revision. The resulting works move beyond representation toward interior landscapes shaped by sensation, movement, and emotional resonance.
Fisher’s practice is deeply informed by the places she has encountered: the vivid light and terrain of Kenya, the intimate scale of European villages, the layered visual rhythms of Japan, and the expansive mountain landscapes of Southern California. Each work begins with a remembered moment or spatial experience that is gradually distilled and reimagined through paint. Rather than documenting a specific scene, the paintings explore what remains psychologically and emotionally after experience passes through us — fragments of atmosphere, structure, gesture, and memory held in suspension.
Her background in interior design strongly informs her sensitivity to composition, movement, proportion, and the emotional qualities of space. Before focusing fully on painting, Fisher founded and led two interior design firms, shaping environments grounded in materiality, light, and human experience. This spatial awareness remains central to her visual language.
Fisher holds undergraduate degrees in literature and art history from Indiana University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree from Syracuse University. She is a Certified California Interior Designer and a LEED AP in Building Design and Construction. Her work has been recognized in juried exhibitions and international competitions, including exhibitions at the Haggin Museum and Studio Montclair, and is held in private collections throughout the United States.