Louise Fishman

If good painting is what you want to do, then good painting is what you must look at," New York-based painter Louise Fishman (born 1939) wrote in a 1977 issue of Heresies. "Take what you want and leave the dreck." Fishman is renowned for her subtractive method of mark-making, which celebrates process and rejects the masculinist impulses of abstract expressionism. She uses scrapers, trowels and traditional brushes to apply and remove dense layers of paint in loose, gestural scores across the canvas. Fishman's training as a sculptor is visible in the physicality of her paint, which is vigorously applied, indexing her movement about the canvas. This comprehensive clothbound monograph spans the evolution of Fishman's practice over the last 60 years of the artist's extensive oeuvre. The fully illustrated volume includes two newly commissioned essays by Debra Singer and Josephine Halvorson, with republished essays by Aruna D'Souza, Andrew Suggs, Suzan Frecon, Bertha Harris and John Yau.