Pat Fisher: Paintings 2018–2024
Photography by Keith Hunter
Designed by James Brook
Self cover booklet | 240 x 130 mm | 12 pages | Printed offset by Gomer Print, Wales, on 150 gsm Arctic Matt
Pat Fisher is a curator and artist and a former Director at Edinburgh’s Talbot Rice Gallery, 2004-2016. This is a modest publication that I designed with Pat which records three exhibitions of her paintings in 2024: at Stallanbrand, Glasgow; the Window, Perth; and at Milchstrasse 4, Munich. I went to see Pat’s exhibition at Stallanbrand and fell in love with these quietly considered paintings so I was delighted to work with her on this project.
The artist had a very clear idea of how her works should be presented and came to me with a small exhibition catalogue of Cy Twombly’s work, published by Gagosian Gallery, to use as a model. The size and general layout is based on that catalogue though with a different typographic approach using Gill Sans Nova, a typeface designed by Monotype Studio designer George Ryan, derived from the original work of the influential British artist Eric Gill (1882-1940). I really like this update to Gill Sans, particularly the elegant non-aligning figures which I used for the catalogue captions but not for the cover titling where standard figures worked better with the arrangement of type.
The typography on the front and back cover is printed in a blue that was sampled from one of the paintings. Like the inside pages, the cover is dominated by white space but, with the coloured typography, I was aiming to create a subtle difference to the inside pages, where the typography is printed in black. I experimented with various colours, including a green similar to the one used on the Cy Twombly catalogue, but, in the end, Pat and I decided that this blue was the strongest colour enabling the text to be comfortably read while also making a connection to the colour palette of the work inside.
The paintings are all centred on the page, two to a page, with captions underneath, also centred. The captions are set over three lines with the title of the painting in bold. As with the cover, there is a lot of white space, giving the paintings room to breathe. For consistency, I removed the backgrounds from the images and added a uniform drop shadow so that the paintings feel like they are all inhabiting the same (virtual) space. The artist and I adjusted the size of the images on the page so that the paintings were proportionally sized in relation to each each other.
It was interesting to hear the artist’s thoughts about paper: we looked at several samples until we found one that felt right – in Pat’s words, one that felt like a ‘fine’ paper. The publication was printed by Gomer in Wales on Arctic Matt, a coated paper with a soft, white matt surface with a natural feel and a slight warmth. Initially, I had suggested a bulkier paper, around 170 gsm, but the artist wanted a lighter paper (and possibly one even lighter than the 150 gsm we eventually selected). In the end, I am happy that we chose the weight that we did as I think that with a lighter paper, we may have had see-through and I think that would have been detrimental to the images on the page of Pat’s beautiful paintings.
