Janet Fish

Janet Fish (born May 18, 1938 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a contemporary American artist.[1] She paints still life paintings, some of light bouncing off reflective surfaces, such as plastic wrap containing solid objects and empty or partially filled glassware.[2]

Contents

Biography

Born in a family of artists—her mother a sculptress, father a painter, uncle a wood carver[3]—Fish grew up in Bermuda and knew early on that she wanted to pursue the visual arts. Pursuing sculpture first, by 1963 she was painting.[4]

Her education includes:

She is interested in painting light and a concept she has on occasion called "packaging." For instance, if she paints a jar of pickles, the jar becomes "packaging," and this can translate into a searching for the light that describes the jar, and a subsequent translation into color.

Excerpts from an interview:

Janet Fish: "When I got to New York, I was simply trying to figure out what I wanted painting to be. There were problems with what I could do. I was trying to paint something three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface. I threw some apples down on the table and started painting them. The paintings took a long, long time. Slowly I began enlarging the things and then focusing more on the object than on the surroundings. I went from that to painting packages, supermarket things. I liked the way the plastic was going over the solid objects, and I liked how it broke the forms up. I was trying to define my interests and I was eliminating everything that I wasn't interested in. Trying to get more and more toward something I wanted to paint. So this was kind of a reductive approach."
Interviewer: "That was sort of a self-imposed process?"
Janet Fish: "Yeah, I'd do a painting, then another, and I'd compare them. I'd take down the bad painting and leave the better one up and keep pushing along that way. From there I found some jars of pickles, and it was a similar problem, solid object covered by a transparent surface. Once I started doing that, I got really interested in the light coming through the liquid. And that took me into painting bottles and jars, things like that."
...
Interviewer: "Do you go from one subject to another?"
Janet Fish: "No. It's just that the packages got me interested in reflections, and then that became more defined as light, and then as I painted the glass, I started to paint light. My subject was what happened within the object. The paintings at that time weren't about the environment at all, but were about the objects themselves."
Interviewer: "Color obviously plays an important role in your work."
Janet Fish: "Color is light. Color gets the character of light."
...
Interviewer: "When you are setting up, do you keep consistent lighting?"
Janet Fish: "No, I don't. I like to set up in a window, and I prefer it with direct light so it's always moving and changing. It keeps me awake and the light changes the forms and brings in new ideas. Sometimes there is a moment when the light does something in one place that is really exciting. I put it in. I might use the light of another time in another spot. I am not a camera."
Interviewer: "How do you control the light in a painting when you're working like that?"
Janet Fish: "Sometimes I decide on a specific direction where the light might be coming from. But basically I play, I work with what happens. It's really more fun to paint moving light than still light."[6]

Fish's work has been characterized as photorealist and has also been associated with new realism.[7]

Recognition

Museum collections

References

  1. ^ Linea, Journal of the Art Students League of New York, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall 2009
  2. ^ www.harn.ufl.edu/press/03_04_janet_fish.pdf
  3. ^ Interview with Ira Goldberg, the director of the Art Students League of New York published in the fall 2009 issue of Linea, (an Art Students league publication)
  4. ^ http://www.angelfire.com/art/favoritewomenartists/janet_fish.htm
  5. ^ Artnet
  6. ^ Linea, Journal of the Art Students League of New York, Vol. 13, No. 2, Fall 2009; Interview with Ira Goldberg, pages 10, 11, 12.
  7. ^ Artspeak, Robert Atkins, ISBN 978-1558591271
  8. ^ http://wwol.is.asu.edu/fish.html

Sources

External links