The tension between the artistic traditions of realism and abstraction is nowhere more acute than in the art of George Fischer. Jostling images and improvising associations more intuitively, he became a visual poet. Since he paints directly from his subjects the arrangements were free-associational and yet painstakingly organized. Along the way, he began to re-evaluate his relationship to the larger tradition of the art of painting, and eventually he had to confront the legacy of formalist abstraction, which had been proscribed by his training. His engagement with the language of abstraction transformed his pictorial resources, expanding his vocabulary of visual forms as well as his painterly handling. The result is an extraordinary postmodernist hybrid, rich with possibilities.