TBT: Through the Silence by Alexis Milo Fish
Come see the last weekend of Alexis' Art Exhibition if you haven't had the chance yet...
For Alexis Fish, art is not always black and white-although
looking at her current collection of work, it may appear that
way. "It's rare that I use color, and if I do sometimes, it's the
smallest amount," explained Fish. She says it's not necessarily
that she doesn't like color, but more that color seems a
challenge to work with, and it takes her longer to get pieces
exactly the way she wants them to look. "Graphite feeds my OCD
and my need for everything to be precise and clean," said Fish of
her preferred medium. Her pencil-drawn collection currently
ranges from surrealistic renditions of fairylike women and animal
silhouettes to fan art portraits of characters from "Harry
Potter" and "Stranger Things." All of them are rendered in black
and white, sometimes with the slightest hint of color that's so
subtle it's hard to notice. The 24-year-old artist resides in
Doylestown with her husband, Ilya, and draws a lot of her
inspiration from fairytales, both Disney versions and the
original folk tales like those written by the Brothers Grimm.
Fish is also inspired by contemporary fantasies and other works
of fiction in books and film. In personal appearance, Fish
resembles the fictional characters with whom she surrounds
herself. In fact, her grandmother, the first of many artistic
mentors, used to call her "Snow White" for her dark hair and fair
skin when she was young. "When I was old enough to hold a pencil
and a pen, my grandmother would let me draw with her," Fish
recalled.
Much like her grandmother, who she says drew animals and
sometimes geisha girls as a hobby, Fish loves to combine
portraits, flowers and animals to create her own surrealistic
works of art. "Usually my compositions are not something that
would normally appear in nature," said Fish, who doesn't draw
realistic portraits or still lifes. She likes adding an element
of fantasy to much of her work. Although Fish loved art from a
young age, spending extracurricular activities in the art room
and enrolling in after-school art programs at Lafayette College
while still in high school in New Jersey, she admits she needed a
nudge from her husband to peruse her dreams of being an artist
even further. "My husband for a while was like, 'You need to do
something with it. You can keep drawing pictures all you want,
but if you don't do anything with them, what's the point?'" said
Fish. With his help, she enrolled in a mentorship program with an
established artist that gave her the push she needed to set goals
for herself. In 2015, she got her website up and running, and
started selling prints. Around the same time, Fish signed up to
be a vendor at the Doylestown Arts Festival to sell her initial
batch of prints & became a resident artist at Countryside
Gallery & Custom frame Design in Newtown. Since then, she has
been focusing on selling her prints and originals on her website,
and has done a couple shows, including a few tattoo conventions.
Alexis' original work as well as signed giclee can be found on
permanent display at our South State Street gallery.