The Painting Program is pleased to present a lecture by noted painter and Tyler BFA Alum ('63) Louise Fishman. The lecture will take place in the 3rd floor Painting Critique and Event Space from 11:00-12:00 PM on Wednesday, October 2nd. The program is fortunate to have Louise Fishman speak at this time as she currently has a solo exhibition at Locks Gallery, here in Philadelphia, titled, My City, which runs until October 19th.

Louise Fishman was born in 1939 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Although young Fishman’s ambition was to become an athlete, she was inspired to enter art school after a fortuitous meeting with an art student shortly after her high-school graduation. In 1956, Fishman began studying art at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art and went on to study at Stella Elkins Tyler School of Art, where she earned her BFA in Painting and Printmaking and a BS in Art Education in 1963. Fishman also studied for a brief period at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1965 she completed her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana, then headed directly to New York, where she has lived and worked ever since, along with ten years spent working in her studio in Upstate New York.

Coming from a truly singular artist with a powerful and demanding vision, Louise Fishman’s paintings are tough and uncompromising. Her work is architectonic, each painting containing an improvised structural grid assembled out of strokes, skeins, and slashes of paint. Containment and release work against each other. Shadow is as important as light, and color is always challenged. Her work celebrates process. Using scrapers and trowels, along with more traditional paint brushes, Fishman constructs loosely-gridded compositions by adding, scraping away, and re-applying paint, sometimes working and reworking canvases over a long period of time. At a time when postmodernism claimed painting to be “dead,” Fishman’s decisive re-appropriation of abstraction repositioned it for a different era and gender.