Scenes from the American West

Tools of learning are common motifs in the work of Vernon Fisher, a Texas artist who was born and raised in Fort Worth and continues to work there today. Globes, rulers, maps, and graph paper are all incorporated into surprising compositions also filled with words, cartoons, and ephemera such as snapshots clipped from magazines. Taken together, the resulting works of art walk a tightrope between the familiar and reliable and the unknown. In 1980, Fisher made his first blackboard painting, a trope he would return to repeatedly as a metaphor for knowledge and erasure. “Blackboards seem to have, in addition to the obvious pedagogical associations, affinities with the process of thought and memory,” Fisher has explained.

Scenes from the American West is emblematic of the themes explored in Fisher’s art. An image of an emptied swimming pool fills a cavity where Mickey Mouse’s brain might be, and Mickey’s black figure is an illusionistic blackboard. Partially blurred planets, math equations, and doodles are scrawled across the surface. The whites of Mickey’s eyes reveal scaffolding, referencing Fisher’s painting on which this print is based. In that painting, actual wood trestlework supports the assembled planks that form Mickey’s head; the image of the pool, along with all the “chalk” and blackboard imagery, is hand painted.