Arline Fisch: Big! Bold! Bright! by Pat Worrell

text iamge - Big! Bold! Bright!

Radient colors mark the life, work, and home
of California artist Arline Fisch

BY PAT WORRELL • PHOTOGRAPHY BY WILLIAM GULLETTE

favorite colors of internationally recognized art jeweler Arline Fisch. They're evident as soon as you open the front door to her San Diego, Calif., home: purple and red. Fisch has lived in her urban bungalow, built in 1913 as a "honeymoon cottage" in the Mission Hills neighborhood, since 1966. Its brown wooden exterior gives no hint to the cacophony of colors—rich purple, bright red, burning orange, vibrant yellow—that surround the senses inside.

This Living Treasure of California (so named by the State Assembly in 1985) traces her affinities to craft and color to her childhood in Queens, N.Y. Fisch's mother taught her to sew her own clothes and weave baskets. Her father loved the color red. "I love purple, and I like purple and red together,"

To create "Pink & Silver Circles," far left, Arline Fisch machine-knit coated copper and fine silver, then crocheted the edges. In 1989 Fisch extended her house with this library/bedroom. She made "The Girls," the screen in the corner, as a departure from her usual work.