About THE ARTIST
Throughout her over fifty-year career, Janet Fish has committed herself to the exploration of color and light in her paintings, pastels, and watercolors. Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1938, Fish received her BA from Smith College in 1960 and her MFA from Yale University in 1963. At Yale, her fellow students included Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Richard Serra, a tight-knit group who formed an intense, ambitious, competitive group that motivated one another to develop and defend their work. There, Fish was taught Abstract Expressionism, the predominant painting style of the time. However, she found it difficult to connect with the art form and struggled to find meaning in her large gestural paintings. Encouraged by Alex Katz, her teacher during her summer at The Skowhegan School and Painting & Sculpture, Fish began painting landscapes, proving to be a breakthrough in her artistic practice. Following her graduation from Yale, Fish moved to New York City.
Starting in the late 1960s, Fish began her exploration of nature and the substance of light, which would become a life-long preoccupation. In these early works, she focused on commonplace objects with a transparent quality, insisting that her subject matter, glasses, fruits covered in supermarket cellophane, or liquid-filled containers, was unimportant. Instead, for Fish, the meaning was determined by tone, gesture, color, light, and scale. Moving forward, Fish began painting solid objects as well, while still allowing the concept of light to carry the energy and movement within her artwork. Her work was not about narrative, instead, the objects, application of paint, textures, and dynamism of luminosity are all crafted to create an experience for the viewer.
In the late 1970s, Fish expanded her practice and focused on painting tablescapes and groups of domestic items, including vases, shells, and patterned fabrics. As explained by curator Trevor Fairbrother, “Eventually she chose to work with varied groups of things, including flowers, fabrics, and ceramics. At the same time she pulled back from the arrangement in order to give the surrounding space an active role in the visual extravaganza. This approach…continues to inform Fish’s pictures, and her goals remain the same: to show light interacting with a mixture of objects, flitting between them, setting off visual echoes and counterpoints, and generating an overt, symphonious, flowing movement.”
In the 1990s and 2000s, Fish once again expanded the worldview in her works, painting friends and family, outdoor scenes, and animals. No matter what she depicts in her paintings, the exploration of light has always remained central to Fish’s image-making. In the artist’s own words: “I see light as energy, and energy is always moving through us. I don’t see things as being separated—I don’t paint the objects, I paint one after the other. I paint through the painting.”