Janet Fish
American, born 1938
She received a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Yale in 1963. Among her classmates was a new generation of artists whose work arose also from Abstract Expressionism: Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Richard Serra, Brice Marden, and Rackstraw Downs.
Fish has become well known for executing large, colorful still life paintings of glasses and other reflective objects placed on cloth-covered table tops. While her work is obviously influenced by the 17th century Dutch still-life tradition celebrating the bounty of the harvest and the beauty of nature, it also reveals French Impressionist influence in the intertwining of light-filled strokes of vibrant color. This technique provides for smooth yet lively gestures that move across the surface of the canvas, drawing the viewer's eyes from object to object.
Fish's interest in exploring an active canvas can be traced in part to her youth, growing up in Bermuda, which she describes as "a small, crowded island… [where] there's a profusion, a density, of vegetation which might have led me toward the very active surfaces I paint." (2)
Janet Fish is considered a "new realist" painter in that she is less concerned with copying the superficial likeness of things in an academic way than she is with expressing the light, colors and textures perceived in the natural world. (3) Her approach to painting reflects her experience with the active canvas of Abstract Expressionism as well as her deliberate choice to paint real objects.
In 1997, Fish's Raspberries and Goldfish was included in "Still Life: The Object in American Art 1915-1995", an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Curator Lowery Sims noted the skepticism that surrounded the new American Realism, even 40 years after its introduction. "We may be a little suspicious these days of the pictorialism in realist painting. Right now, there's a greater interest in the objective gaze that captures the more gritty aspects of life. There's a tendency to favor theory over the formal aspects of painting. When I was putting together this show, I noticed how Janet hadn't just randomly arranged these flowers…the painting was deliberate in its compositional and lighting choices. There was a lot more going on than met the eye. It was more than skillfully capturing visual effects." (4)
Paintings by Janet Fish have been exhibited throughout the U.S. and overseas. They form part of the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Art Institute of Chicago; Columbus Museum; and many other public and private collections.
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