Title: Mixed Reality
Artist: Scott Fisher
Medium and Materials: Oil, gold leaf, and mixed media on wood panel
Dimensions: 10" x 10"
Mixed Reality is a captivating square pop-surrealist landscape that explores the boundary between traditional painting and modern collage. Classical ruins frame a sunlit bay at sunset, while massive textured blocks of gold leaf interrupt the sky, suggesting a fragmented experience of time, space, and perception.
Gallery Description
In Mixed Reality, contemporary surrealist Scott Fisher presents a richly intellectual visual experience on a precise 10" x 10" wood panel. The composition places the viewer inside the grassy courtyard of a ruined classical temple, using architecture as a frame for a transformed landscape beyond.
Along the left edge, two grand fluted columns with detailed Ionic capitals rise from the foreground. On the right, a fractured stone archway anchors the scene, while low masonry blocks and a small cluster of white wildflowers add intimate detail at ground level.
Through the archway, the landscape opens onto a calm bay or lake channel catching the last light of sunset before a distant mountain ridge. Above the horizon, the sky becomes a vast circular field of cadmium orange and fiery amber. Fisher then disrupts the painted illusion with hard-edged rectangular blocks of metallic gold leaf, whose crinkled surfaces catch ambient light and contrast with the smooth oil glazes beneath. The result is a striking collision of ancient architecture, natural atmosphere, and contemporary geometric abstraction.
Style and Composition
- Artistic style: Pop Surrealism with mixed-media Classical Realism and geometric abstraction.
- Composition: A symmetrical architectural gateway layout, with temple columns on the left and a stone arch on the right framing a central circular sunset. Hard-edged rectangular gold-leaf fields interrupt the upper margins.
- Focal point: The small, intense sun at the center of the vast orange circle, drawing the eye beyond the foreground ruins.
- Color palette: Fiery cadmium orange, metallic gold leaf, and amber copper balanced by earthy moss greens, stone grays, and deep navy-indigo mountain silhouettes.
- Lighting and atmosphere: High-drama sunset backlighting gives the foreground ruins a warm glow, while the metallic sky panels create a shimmering, majestic, and contemplative mood.
Application and Technique
- Brushwork and mark-making: Loose yet descriptive in the foreground foliage and ruined columns, with crisp masking lines separating the smooth painted sky from the physical, crinkled texture of the metallic leaf blocks.
- Layering and depth: Multi-planar perspective pulls the high-contrast stone columns into the foreground, while flat geometric gold-leaf blocks create a shifting visual field that challenges traditional atmospheric depth.
- Tools and materials: Heavy-body oil paint, metallic gold leaf, and mixed-media elements on a prepared rigid wood panel, using crisp architectural masking and fine detail liners for the fluted column ridges and delicate capital ornament.
Inventory Status: Available for purchase online or in the gallery.
Shipping / Pickup: Shipping is available, with items securely packaged in professional archival materials, insured, and shipped globally; complimentary local pickup is also available at our 23 North Main Street gallery.
