Jane Fisher, “Black Pajamas”, Oil on Canvas, 2013

Born in 1961, Jane Fisher received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio University, where she won the Sara Sidwel Rogers Prize for her work at the Undergraduate Art League Exhibition in 1982. She earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1984. Fisher has shown her work at exhibitions since 1984 and has become well known in the San Francisco Bay Area. 

A figurative painter, Jane Fisher paints ordinary, identifiable people in familiar settings as individuals rather than as ideals. Her subject matter is diverse, ranging from divers in mid-air to models at an auto exhibition. Fisher’s work has been shown at the Charles Campbell Gallery and the George Krevsky Gallery, both in San Francisco, The Gescheidle Gallery in Chicago, and the LyonsWier Packer Gallery in New York. 

“The ideas for my paintings emerge as emotions. My task is to turn those emotions into images. I do this by playing on the viewer’s empathy, sympathy, curiosity and sense of humor. My paintings are figurative, presenting people in varying degrees of self-awareness. I am interested in how people behave alone as well as how they present themselves to others when they want to make a specific impression. These are the two main contexts I have used in exploring this; presenting people in moments of isolation, and presenting them in performance.” 

-— Jane Fisher