Painter Andreas Fischer makes copies–or in some cases, copies of copies–of people’s doodles or sketches. Now 30, he was inspired to do this while in graduate school, partly by an essay by art historian David Summers, who argued that context is a work’s meaning: an equestrian statue, for instance, should be seen in terms of who carved it, its materials, and the circumstances surrounding its production.
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Born in South Dakota in 1971, Fischer lived in Butte, Montana, until he was six, then moved to Iowa and later Indiana when his father, a minister in the United Church of Christ, changed congregations. Beginning college as a premed student, he switched to art and transferred to the School of the Art Institute. “I wanted to be hard-core about learning about the most sophisticated level of painting,” he says. “So I got really reductive, doing black-and-white-and-gray line paintings, trying to understand how things would work when everything was in the visual relationships.”
Fischer’s next piece after Friday Night Doodle had its beginnings when he and his girlfriend at the time were visiting his family, and his mom brought out something she called “the envelope,” which contained pictures of his past girlfriends–“about 14 or 15” of them. His girlfriend said, “I don’t want to end up in the envelope,” and they had an argument. Months later Fischer asked her to make sketches of the photos. He liked her drawings (“I sort of had a weakness for them formally”) but wondered if she was intentionally drawing the girls in an unflattering manner. In his Drawings of My X-Girlfriends by My Current Girlfriend, Made With My Current Girlfriend’s Lipstick, he tried to make the size of each redrawn sketch correspond to the time he’d spent with that woman.
