• Ian Fisher — Atmosphere No. 38
• Ian Fisher — Atmosphere No. 34
• Ian Fisher — Atmosphere No. 35
• Ian Fisher — Atmosphere No. 40
• Ian Fisher — Atmosphere No. 47 (The Four Horsemen)
• Ian Fisher — Atmosphere No. 49 (Lost Territory)
• Ian Fisher — Atmosphere No. 50 (Follow You Into the Dark)
• Ian Fisher — Atmosphere No. 51 (Paramount

Clouds. Billowy gigantic ones that look and feel like a storm’s coming: blasts of cool wet air, ominous greens; towers of steam a thousand stories high, heavy and floating, silently exploding.

They’re stately and awesome, majestic. We’re flying.

The paintings play with color, form, and space in complex ways. A painting might at first glance seem to be structured around an atmospheric perspective shift from one set of colors to another, but look again and see a whole rainbow of hue and dramatic, unexpected tonal inversions. Sometimes these deviations read as the result of out-of-frame structures shaping and obscuring the light; just as often they’re clearly capricious, invented. But the paintings get away with it; the spaces and the apparent realism never ring false, they always ring true.

It’s the same with the forms. Whole columns of cloud might be flattened or deleted, showing the sky behind them in a flight of pure fancy which jars you into seeing the paintings as careful, thoughtful constructions rather than (mere?) representational windows. But you have to look. All of this action is hidden in plain sight.