Jessica Fisher
Jessica C Fisher is a New York City-based painter whose evocative oil paintings explore emotion, darkness, and intimate moments that shape our inner lives. She has studied with Sterling Hundley, Henrik Uldalen, and Edward Povey, and completed residencies at the Quarantine Project in Menorca, Spain, and the Riven Project. Her work is informed by cinema, photography, poetry, and music, creating layered narratives with poetic titles that invite introspection. Her paintings have been exhibited in New York City, London, Athens, and at Red Dot Miami.
Artist Statement
My paintings are confessions.
They begin as unbidden images that rise in my mind—visions I must explore to understand what my subconscious is trying to tell me. Through sketches, thumbnails, and preparatory studies, I work out the composition, color, and tonal range, but the true work is emotional archaeology. I’m excavating a deep well of feelings I locked away during a turbulent childhood spent feeling unsafe, unwanted, alone. Only recently have I begun allowing myself to feel again.
Painting in oils became my way of breaking down the walls I built for survival. The medium’s forgiving nature mirrors the self-compassion I’m learning—allowing the paint to surprise me, to collaborate, to reveal truths I didn’t know I was holding. I work from a small corner of my apartment, barefoot, listening to music that matches the emotion I’m channeling onto canvas. My titles come after, when I sit with the finished work and ask: what does this make me remember? What does this make me feel?
My Blasphemous Saints series examines the darker aspects of human existence we’ve elevated to worship through our words and actions. Cantor of the Sanguine Psalm: The Saint of Brutality confronts America’s numbing relationship with violence—a multi-mouthed creature of gnashing teeth, devouring us with its unending hunger for pain. Queen of Eyes: The Saint of Unveiled Truths explores our complicity in seeing without acknowledging.
We build walls to protect ourselves, but those walls keep us separate. My paintings crawl over those barriers to touch people, to say: someone else feels these things too. It’s safe here. When I stopped painting for viewers and started painting for myself, I found freedom. Now I paint to know myself, and in doing so, invite others to know themselves.
https://www.jessicacfisher.com/
