In the early 1970s, my parents bought a dilapidated Victorian house. Over fifty years, first they made it livable. Then they made it nice.
Occasionally, on a Saturday morning, someone in the family might start tearing up a linoleum floor, revealing the original hardwood beneath.
But if you snoop around—in an upstairs closet, or under the boxes on the landing of the basement stairs—you might still find a patch of floral linoleum, simple and charming in its design.
Hand-colored carbon transfer on wood panel, open edition.
6.625" H x 4.75" W x 1.125" D
A M Fisher is an artist working with repetition, drawing, and printed matter. Possessed by folk logic and etiolated by the wan present, his open edition watercolors are traced by hand using carbon paper and variably colored.
Pricing and open edition structure are part of the pattern, too. The image is repeated because it is useful, or pleasurable, or intuitive. Scarcity isn’t the value. Form is the value. Selling an open edition at a modest price follows this logic. It allows the image to circulate without any single version becoming more important than another. In contemporary art, price is often aligned with meaning. A high price suggests significance. A limited edition creates urgency, exclusivity, hierarchy. It teaches the collector to think about owning before thinking about looking. Here, the image is available. The pattern is open.