When Ellen Fischer’s oil portraits go up in a one-woman show at the Center for Spiritual Care next Friday, there may be one or two that people recognize: some prominent Vero women and the town’s ubiquitous palm-frond weaver known as Bibble.
If other faces on the gallery walls are unfamiliar, that’s a good thing: Fischer’s latest subjects are painted from mug shots, most from the website SmokingGun.com. Far from the pride-filled portraits of CEOs and ancestors, these forced sittings show their subjects startled and intruded upon. The alleged crime, as well as the subject’s identity, guilt or innocence, are unrevealed and, to Fischer, irrelevant.
The unexpected poignancy Fischer captures in this series comes through in other paintings in the show. One portrait of a woman in her 80s – an art collector Fischer met professionally – is strikingly regal, the subject dignified and beautiful. “She’s like an empress,” Fischer says. But at the lower edge of the painting, the padded metal arm of a wheelchair reveals itself, a subliminal barrier to the viewer and for the subject, a barrier in her daily life.
Other paintings not in the show are of buildings and street scenes. But these will never show up on picture postcards, if those still exist. Rather, the compositions seem drawn from the forgettable scenes glimpsed driving over a causeway, stepping around a corner, coming over a hill, peering past railroad tracks.
In ways, Fischer captures the same sense of intrusion that her mug shot portraits convey. The hard edges and angles of overlooked urban spaces direct us to a surprising point of beauty and vulnerability.
Fischer, schooled as a painter and later licensed as an art appraiser, came to Vero in 1997 from the Museum of Art in Lafayette, Indiana, for the job of curator of the Vero Beach Museum of Art. Four years later, she left the museum and for more than a decade served as gallery manager and assistant to the late Harvey Littleton, the nationally renowned glass sculptor who late in life made Fort Pierce his home.
Fischer is also a journalist; along with essays and historical context for museum exhibits, she has written for local magazines and contributes regularly to this section.
So when someone shared an implausible news story on her Facebook timeline, about two people arrested for selling tickets to heaven, she immediately set about debunking it. She found that the story was an April Fool’s joke. But the mugshots were real, and one she found particularly moving.
“What a world we live in,” she says. “You can go online and you can see someone in their very worst moment and because this is public property you can do whatever you want with it. You can put it in a fake story. You can make the person a figure of fun. But these are real people being made to look ridiculous.”
It was the woman in the couple whose expression particularly reached out to Fischer.
“It affected me so much,” says Fischer. “I thought, I’m going to paint her and try to give her back some dignity in an oil painting. Because what’s more dignified than having an oil portrait done?”
Fischer inserts similar dignity into her architecture paintings, including the oddly arresting streetscapes of tiny Ronceverte, West Virginia, her grandparents’ home. Though she spent her childhood in the Chicago area, earning a degree in fine art through Indiana University and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she returns every year to Ronceverte for a large family reunion.
This summer, she went back several times to paint, becoming something of a folk hero to the townspeople who saw her wandering their neighborhoods every morning, picking out some interesting perspective for her canvas.
“Every painting I do, I try to have a sense of place even if you don’t know where it is,” she says. “In one way, they’re technical formal exercises and in other ways they are very specific places and to me they have an emotion.”
So do the mugshots, and the emotion she senses is typically not the fear or shame that the website’s followers seize on.
“When you’re painting somebody’s face you start to crawl into their minds,” she says.
Fischer reflects on her experience and the artists who once toured asylums to paint patients in the throes of madness. From that April Fool’s Day prank, she set about restoring the arrested woman’s humanity.
”It takes a while to paint a portrait and by the time I was done, I felt I had given her something back. It’s just for me. It doesn’t change anything that people are made fun of for being in a bad situation. But I wanted to make her a human being.”
Fischer, by all accounts prolific, paints mostly for herself. A group show last year in Tiger Lily Gallery featured mostly Florida landscapes and a seascape with a grey sheet of rain across half the horizon, a painting fellow artist Sean Sexton claimed “knocked me to my knees.”
At least twice, she has painted the approach to the 17th Street Causeway, once from each direction, and both featuring the tall towers of the power plant. The more representational of the two sold after a woman, an artist herself, saw it and came back two days later, telling Fischer, “I could not stop thinking of this painting.”
When invited to paint interiors of the Laura Riding Jackson home for a benefit, the paintings sold out before the event started.
This time, though, she has no such expectations. “I’m putting on my appraiser hat here: Portraits are a hard sell.”
All the better for Fischer, if it means she can enjoy her favorites longer. That includes the portrait of Beatriz Foster, a prominent Los Angeles psychiatrist (and a favorite of actress Cary Fisher, Foster’s patient, who mentioned her in two autobiographies.). Foster was an ardent art collector with excellent taste, Fischer says. When she retired and moved to Vero, she became an appraisal client of Fischer’s.
Fischer, with permission, took a snapshot of Foster from which to paint a portrait “for myself,” she made clear. She nevertheless took it by to show Foster, and the reaction took Fischer aback.
“Oh my God, I look like my mother,” Foster gasped.
Fischer pointed out that that could be a good thing.
“That is not a good thing,” came the reply.
She did manage to sell another large portrait – for a price so low, it barely covered the frame. Included in the Center for Spiritual Care show, it is of Vinnie Fish, an intrepid freelance photojournalist and painter whom Fischer met at a downtown gallery one night and later profiled for this newspaper. After the interview, Fischer asked to take a photo for a portrait she meant to keep herself. When it was done, Fish came to see it and promptly bought it.
Some time later, though, her daughter brought it back.
“It’s hard to live with one of my portraits, because I paint the person the way I saw them,” Fischer says.
“Everything I paint, I paint for myself. As an artist you think about who your audience is and my audience is myself. You see a lot of people in this town who try to anticipate what people will buy and I’ve given up on that. Nobody comes into my gallery and says ‘Here’s a swatch from my couch.’“
Ellen Fischer’s show opens Friday, Oct. 2 at 5:30 p.m. and continues through Oct. 30. The Center for Spiritual Care is at 1550 24th Street, at the corner of 16th Avenue.
