Realism and abstraction

"The tension between the artistic traditions of realism and abstraction is nowhere more acute than in the art of George Fischer. Born in Chicago in 1956, he honed his natural drawing gifts by training at Chicago’s American Academy of Art, a conservative institution whose rigorous program is based in 19th-century realist practices. Fischer’s technical facility is unexcelled, and he became a master of still-life, landscape, and figurative studies. But the complacency of this approach bothered him. He made a break in the early 1990s, coinciding with his move to New Mexico, when he began to explore a more complex attitude toward imagery." by William Peterson