From the Desk of Marten Hoyle
…they resembled fields of rooted serpents that dance eternally to an other-worldly music
--Clark Ashton Smith
(...)
Dark art acts as a kind of psychological confessional, a place to cleanse the division of light and darkness within oneself, and as with all composers, Dark Artists never truly know where and when a particular vision will affect them in such a way as to inspire.
For William Leighton Fisher, a native of Omaha, Nebraska, the organic fixture of his home state’s natural evolution provided inspiration. Upon viewing the ancient fossils and rock formations of his state, Fisher learned that in Prehistoric Times, the state was an inland sea and that the otherworldly formations were an echo of the past and provided a history lesson in the long-ago materializing of the earth.
The photographs (displayed in the slideshow provided with this article) show the world as an alien realm; the viewer sees Gigerian mountainsides. At a simple glance, the viewer is reminded of something extraterrestrial; a ruined planet rolling in space.
But if one offers time and meditation while looking on these prints, one will see torn canyons of a sallow wasteland below a Martian sun; serrated, columnar rows upon rows of crustaceous mounds, grouped in such a way as to give the appearance of crawling insects of segmented stone, reaching for the sand. There are sights of a dehydrated world where all that remains of the slow apocalyptic process of time are the mollusk bones and soundless conches, burning in the sun where the sea once housed them below the surface and an abyss; the gaping maw of a meteoric wound in a terrain the color of blood, as if the living rock burns with the scarlet fever of infection; forming itself into the likeness of mildew round the lip of the void.
Naturally, these prints are among Fisher’s favorites of his own work.
“I brought my camera to the fossils,” Fisher says. “I wanted to make them look larger than life.”
As an artist, Fisher is influenced largely by the work of H.R. Giger and the Fossil Landscapes earned compliments from Giger’s American agent, Les Barney. Over the years, he has paid homage to Giger with various pencil drawings in the style of the artist. But for his personal works, Fisher sleeps with his easel beside his bed, so that before sleeping and upon waking, he can view the progress of each composition with a fresh eye.
His equipment as an artist is minimalistic; beyond the use of color pencils, Fisher uses only his camera and Adobe Photoshop.
“I like Photoshop,” he says. “It is an extension of [the artistic] medium. Just like ambient music.”
Along with his photographic art and illustrations, Fisher is also a talented composer of Dark Ambient Music, “a subgenre of ambient music that features foreboding, ominous, or discordant overtones.” [Websters.]
[The reader may listen to a sample of Fisher's music by clicking here
A sample of Fisher’s dark music is provided with this article. In listening to it, one may be reminded of the sound frequencies, or “Voices of the Planets” provided by NASA’s voyager exploration of the Gas Giants.
In his versatility, Fisher states that for him art is a constant meditation.
“Art takes you out of the world,” says Fisher. “It is a tool to take oneself deeper and deeper into one’s own soul. It is a constant meditation.”
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