Raised in a Long Island suburb, Fischl, like many other teenagers during the mid-1960s, dropped out of school and ended up in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. When he tired of being a hippie, he went to Arizona, where his family had moved. His draft board let him stay enrolled in a local community college. A few years later, he transferred to the new California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, where David Salle and Ross Bleckner were fellow students. By 1974, Fischl was an assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, in Halifax. Two figureless Fischls from this period—textured, shaped canvases with words inscribed into the pigment—were on view recently in a group show at the Fondation Maeght, in France.

With Gornik, whom he met in Halifax, Fischl moved to New York in 1978. Leaping from the world of abstraction, which had dominated the art world for decades, he made, on separate sheets of transparent glassine paper, intriguing oil drawings of naked women and boys and some dressed figures, as well as objects like chairs, cots and bathtubs. Fischl’s images of adolescent angst and suburban couplings became the basis of his first mature paintings. “I was looking at situations that were not considered the domain of art,” he recalls, “and I was seeing them through the eyes of a young boy.” Fischl painted adolescents in situations that transformed gallerygoers into voyeurs, even coconspirators, rather than idle viewers. His pictures helped usher in a return to representational art and the use of oil.

Initially, Fischl worked from memory. Subscribing to the notion that people remember details like an unkempt bed, sunlight shining through window blinds or the program playing on a television set, he deliberately didn’t use models or photographs. But he found himself feeling uncomfortable with the “distortions” he saw on his canvas. “I didn’t trust my ability to render,” he says. So he began taking photographs in the early 1980s. “It gave me little moments that seem concrete. Photography makes everyone look off balance, awkward. It started to inform me about body language.”

For Fischl, sculpture has been the ideal medium for exploring old-fashioned notions of figurative form and emotionally charged gesture. For the moment, it might be difficult to recognize ourselves in his contorted bronze statues, which seem to have more in common with Martha Graham’s choreography than with our everyday lives. But given the artist’s history, it’s easy to believe that in a year or two, this way of regarding human form will seem more familiar.

Like a good modernist, Fischl knows that sculpture involves different concepts than painting does. “So much of the memory is in the hands, not the eyes,” he explains. “It’s why I love sculpture. It’s about stored memory, about all the things I’ve touched.” Why bother with photographs? “I need to look at them for certain anatomical details—say, how the hip is attached to the quad.”

Fischl now describes himself as an artist who works from collage. He embraces this term because he’s appropriating characters and settings from photographs he’s downloaded on his computer. This allows him to continually tell new stories. As a painter who studied with second-generation Abstract Expressionists, Fischl says he loves the heroic idea of “discovery and execution happening simultaneously on the canvas.”

He no longer struggles to figure out where to put, for instance, a man and a chair. He doesn’t find himself repainting them three inches from where he first positioned them. With the computer, he goes “through 1,000 ideas in a short time.” This freedom introduces fresh energy. For Eric Fischl, as he completes his latest batch of canvases in the studio near Sag Harbor, “colors, fluidity, sureness—all these things come through in a new way that makes the paintings better.”

"In the Studio: Eric Fischl" originally appeared in the January 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's January 2008 Table of Contents.