Fisk Assessment

Wowing curators and critics with his work, Toronto painter William Fisk finds the personal in the seemingly impersonal, mining the unexpected humanity of everyday objects. By Viia Beaumanis

Untitled No. 105, 2022. Oil on canvas. 32” x 50”. Portrait Series. Private collection, Southampton, N.Y. Photo: imagefoundry, Toronto

Like many artistic children, young William Fisk wasn’t thriving in the mainstream academic environment. When he was expelled from middle school, in the early ’80s, his mother — looking to focus his creativity and keep him out of trouble — enrolled him in Claude Watson School for the Arts. This public arts-education school in Toronto deftly attended to both his rebelliousness and his talent, with Fisk happily illustrating yearbook covers while at the desk he occupied regularly in the principal’s office.

It was just over a decade later, when Fisk would stroll out of OCAD University — a gifted painter with a BA in fine arts — and straight into the Christopher Cutts Gallery, one of Toronto’s leading art venues. Signing

ABOVE: William Fisk in his studio. Portrait: Joseph Hartman. LEFT: Untitled No. 92, 2018. Oil on canvas. 54” x 48”. OPPOSITE PAGE: Untitled No. 85, 2016. Oil on canvas. 53” x 30”. Private collection, Toronto. Both Portrait Series. Photos: imagefoundry, Toronto

the 24-year-old straight out of school, Christopher Cutts, the gallery’s namesake curator, would mount, between 1995 and 2001, six solo exhibitions of Fisk’s work, five of which sold out.

“I was utilizing images from media and disparate sources, thinking about constructed dialogues, how context controls the narrative,” Fisk says of his work at the time, citing Robert Longo, John Baldessari and David Salle as his influences. With his studio costs covered by the late collector and arts patron Gordon Eberts — OCAD’s prize for emerging artists was named after Eberts — Fisk would, in 1998, land on what would become his signature style.

“Two panels, oil on canvas,” says Fisk, now 53. “When I was working on it, I was, like, that…is fucking great!” The artist is pointing at a photo of the painting tacked onto his studio wall — a large canvas split between two images: a mid-century chair and a woman’s face. The “fucking great” was for the chair. “It was one of those intuitive moments that’s part of the flow… and grew into this,” he enthuses.

“This” is a slowly-expanding, two-decade oeuvre focused on outsized, ultra-realistic images of everyday objects. Cameras and clocks, rotary phones, a vintage taxi meter — each was pulled from Fisk’s select assemblage of mid-century paraphernalia and so meticulously rendered that, from even a few feet away, they read as photographs. Just don’t call it photorealism.

“Intent is what differentiates my work from photorealism,” Fisk explains. He’s standing by the huge window of his sunny studio on Toronto’s west side. “It’s a concise application, the careful construction of a photographic image, but it’s not the predetermined end point. It’s a reference point that continues the story — this idea of the object as a springboard for an unknown narrative. [It’s] how you can look at an old camera and wonder: How many weddings were photographed with that? How many holidays?” he says.

“[Fisk] is more properly called a Precisionist,” says Donald Kuspit, the preeminent American art critic and historian, in the 2018 exhibition catalogue of Fisk’s work. “The Old Precisionist was preoccupied with objects…. The New Precisionist, epitomized by Fisk, is concerned with their subjective, ‘all too human’ meaning. Exquisitely rendered, his objects are not as soulless as they seem. [They] have ‘personality’ despite their impersonal appearance.”

Either way, it’s precisely that exactitude, alongside the nostalgia evoked by Fisk’s >

“Before social media, you needed access and the only access was through a gallery. Now all I need is a website.”

chosen objects, relics of simpler times, that make his work so accessible. Ideally, a viewer understands the subtext of his work, but with talent and technique as well defined as the subject matter, Fisk’s paintings can be appreciated just as well in an utterly guileless manner.

“Fisk has an extraordinary ability for capturing light and reflection, but the work is deeper than a mere exercise in technique,” says David Liss who has admired Fisk’s work since the late ’90s, around, around the time he arrived from Montreal to accept the director/curator position at Toronto’s Museum of Contemporary Art. “It’s easy to be impressed by his skill in rendering images so realistically, but the exaggerated scale is not realistic at all, which is a key factor in interpreting the work. That the objects portrayed are primarily antiquated technologies means that they will be perceived differently by different people. For some, it will be an experience in memory and nostalgia; for others, a history lesson. These are analogue artifacts. There’s an opportunity to appreciate the aesthetic beauty of the engineering and design, and to recall another era, when we controlled technology, unlike today, where technology has infiltrated every aspect of our lives.”

New Classism, Refined Objectivism, New Precisionism, Illusionism — whatever you want to label his art, Fisk’s creative shift to portraits of objects garnered him solo shows at leading contemporary galleries, like Forum in New York and L.A.’s Bernarducci. Departing Christopher Cutts in 2007, Fisk jumped to Nicholas Metivier and then, in 2019, began repping himself.

Painting five hours a day, it takes Fisk two to four months to finish a canvas. He turns out fewer than five paintings each year, which are priced by scale and complexity. Smaller works start at $20,000, while a more extravagantly sized 120” x 65” piece runs $90,000. A painting of a rotary phone leaning against a wall is off to a buyer in Southampton, N.Y., and Fisk has a commission with a client in the Bahamas, who has bought three paintings and has his eye on a fourth. Closer to home, National Ballet star Greta Hodgkinson owns a Fisk, and prominent lawyer Clayton Ruby was among the artist’s first buyers. Interior designer Brian Gluckstein owns several of his works, including a large image of a 1935 Kodak camera that once hung in the office of Peter Boris, executive vice-president of Pace Gallery in Manhattan.

“Before social media, you needed access and the only access was through a gallery. Now all I need is a website,” says Fisk, who, two

“I was utilizing images from media and disparate sources, thinking about constructed dialogues, how context controls the narrative.”

decades in, had grown weary of 50-percent gallery commissions. Fortuitous timing. Just a few months later, a global pandemic would replace champagne vernissage and buzzy galleries with solo studio visits. Two years on, with the world starting to reopen, his work is once again on public display.

“We fell in love with Fisk’s paintings,” says Jim Shedden, referencing Alexa Greist, his co-curator for a major show at the Art Gallery of Ontario, featuring Fisk’s works alongside those of Hockney, Haring, Oldenburg, Warhol and Basquiat.

“[From] cave paintings to TikTok, the exhibit looks at the human impulse to document our everyday lives and to share that documentation with family, extended family or larger audiences,” Shedden says of “I AM HERE: Home Movies and Everyday Masterpieces,” which runs from April 16 to August 14, 2022. “Subtly abstracted” is his description of Polaroid Painting No. 2, one of the works Fisk selected for the exhibit. “It’s an exquisite representation of an everyday object,” Shedden adds.

“Things were once built with integrity, built to last, to be passed down, designed and produced so incredibly well. Not like

THIS PAGE (from left): Untitled No. 81, 2015. Oil on canvas. 76” x 58”. Private collection, New York, N.Y. Untitled No. 66, 2012. Oil on canvas. 32” x 42”. Collection of K-S Woodside, Toronto. OPPOSITE PAGE (from top): Untitled No. 95, 2019. Oil on canvas. 38” x 56”. Private collection, Knoxville, Tenn. Untitled No. 91, 2018. Oil on canvas. 54” x 38”. Private collection, Toronto. All Portrait Series. Photos: imagefoundry, Toronto

now, [when] everything’s disposable,” notes Fisk. “I choose whatever speaks to me, anything that strikes me. I photograph it, blow it up to various scales, and pick one to paint. Usually, a client will drop by, see something being realized and buy it.” Of being approached about commissions, for which there is a year-long waiting list, Fisk says, “Most of the time, I turn that down.”

But not always. Like when figure skater champion Kurt Browning arrived at his studio with a pair of old binoculars, explaining they’d belonged to his father, a trapline hunter from Alberta’s Rocky Mountains. Then, commissioning a second piece, Browning brought in the skates he’d worn for the Olympics. Photographing them from all sides, Fisk ended up painting them from underneath, focused on the metal blades, screws and underpinnings.

“It’s the ‘idea’ of an object, how we view it in reference to time and memory — or absence of memory. When someone asks me to paint something, what I do is have a look at it and think, Will this fit into the series of works? I’ve been doing it for 20 years…. There are only 104.”

And with that, having devoted an hour of his day to this interview, it’s time for William Fisk to get back to No. 105.