Eric Fischl Explores Archetypes of the Creative Mind

Join artist Eric Fischl, co-founder of The Church in Sag Harbor, on Saturday, February 8, at 4 p.m. for “Heaven, Hell and the Garden: Archetypes of the Creative Mind,” musing on three archetypes for emotional and aspirational conditions that all cultures ponder through art.

Speaking specifically about the visual arts of Western art history, Fischl’s lecture will explore how shape, color, line, gesture, pattern and scale — the language an artist chooses to express feelings, thoughts, dreams and more — can be further explored within the dimension of these three classic motifs.

“The archetypes of ‘Heaven, Hell and the Garden’ are handy generalizations for the exploration of ways to look at individual works of art though, albeit a little silly,” Fischl notes.

Come explore works of art (in projection) and hear Eric Fischl’s musings and interpretations of a wonderful array of paintings and drawings from the past 700 or so years.

Eric Fischl was born in New York in 1948. He graduated from the California Institute of Arts in Valencia in 1972 and was a teacher between 1974 and 1978 at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax. Fischl had his first solo show, curated by Bruce W. Ferguson, at Dalhousie Art Gallery in Nova Scotia in 1975 before relocating to New York City in 1978.

Fischl works in multiple mediums such as painting, sculpture and prints, and is mostly known for his large-scale, naturalistic images of middle-class American life.

Fischl has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and Europe. His work is held in the collections of major institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Musée Beaubourg in Paris and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Tickets are $10 ($5 members) at thechurchsagharbor.org. The Church is at 48 Madison Street, Sag Harbor.