But they also manage to convey a surprising airiness via the gaps and reveals in their construction, through which you can see all the way back to the canvas behind. Her paintings are fundamentally blocklike constructions, hand-built like ancient walls they are gridded, girded, gritty, and grouted, carved into with scrapers and knives. Louise found a form that is both the mess and its accommodation: the rectangle. Samuel Beckett said the artist’s task is to find form to accommodate the mess. Louise Fishman, Untitled, 2020, watercolor, color pencil, and pencil on paper, 6 × 9". Anyway, when I saw her, I would not interrupt her because she was deep in thought-about what, who knows-but as de Kooning once said of someone, she had an abstract look on her face. As a girl, she had wanted to be a professional ballplayer, and several writers since have made the connection between sports fields and Louise’s canvases, both of which are delineated rectangles of activity in which coded sets of gestures are pitched, whether baseball pitches or paint strokes. Sometimes I would see her in Chelsea walking around in utilitarian pants and sporty wraparound shades-and Louise was literally sporty. She was never a hangout buddy but an elder stateswoman, a serious-ass painter, a living link to the New York School stretching back to painting giants like Mitchell, Guston, and de Kooning and forward to all us wannabe-serious painters who were still in the grip of that kind of work.
I’d known her since the 1970s, though not that well. Louise’s very presence had always been like a force of nature to me anyway. What now stood in her place was the corpus of her work, a body of enormous heft. And with that, Louise was no more and, as the Jews say, may her memory be for a blessing. THERE WAS AN EMAIL in my inbox on July 26 from Louise Fishman’s wife, Ingrid Nyeboe, with the brief, startling headline “Louise died.” Inside, I was cc’d on a sad notification: Louise had passed away the night before from complications of an illness. Meyer Schapiro, “On the Humanity of Abstract Painting,” 1960 Her sensitiveness shames us whose open eyes fail to grasp these qualities of form. The author is a blind woman, Helen Keller. They rise and sink beneath my fingers, they are full of sudden starts and pauses, and their variety is inexhaustible and wonderful.”. They appear and disappear, are now deep, now shallow, now broken off or lengthened or swelling.
“It is unstraight lines, or many straight and curved lines together, that are eloquent to the touch. Photo: Christian Hogstedt/Art Partner Licensing. Louise Fishman in her studio, New York, April 2016.
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