Janet Fish, Playing with Light

 

Janet Fish

Janet Fish, born in May 1938 in Boston, MA, is a contemporary realist artist who explores the interaction of light with everyday objects, through oil painting, lithography, and screen printing.  Art critics note with delight that she has revitalized the still life genre, updated and changed it in remarkable and distinctive ways (Wikipedia).  She attributes her fascination with light to growing up in Bermuda, a place of bright light and intense color.  I think she might have had this fascination had she stayed in Boston, it seems so natural and intrinsic to her vision in art. 

Janet Fish makes windex beautiful! 

We are contemporaries. We grew up at the same time, in the same era.  Not that I ever knew about or heard about her.   That's how it was growing up in the 1950s and '60s.  Here was this fabulous artist, who embraced change and believed in the interconnectedness of all things, as I do, kindred spirits, but I never saw her art, not even through those glamourous women magazines of the time.  But then I wasn't looking for them with any clarity, either.  I was immersed in Van Gogh and Monet and the art of the male Western canon.  My love of  women's art grew with my love of learning into adulthood.

Light inhabits Fish's paintings, and so does change. This is what draws us in. "The objects that serve as armatures for color and light in her work are exuberant in their state of flux," writes David Moore Gallery, which represents her and has a beautiful  collection of her work.  I love that phrase, "Exuberant in their state of flux."

Sequins, 2003.
Right from my grandparents', and my mom's, table.
That gorgeous, shimmering Depression glass.

Glasses, 1974

After college at Smith and getting her MFA at Yale, where she resisted the Abstract Expressionism of the time, Fish moved to New York City.  She followed her own muse.

"Her paintings from the late 60s and early 70s, studies of transparent objects, began a life-long preoccupation with the nature and substance of light. From the beginning, Fish focused on commonplace objects, insisting that her subject matter, glasses, fruits covered in supermarket cellophane, or liquid filled containers, was unimportant. For Fish, meaning is determined by tone, gesture, color, light, and scale." (David Moore Gallery)

I must say, I also love the subject matter, and how it moves, and how she makes it come alive.  Still lifes in flux, ever changing light, studies in creative contradiction.  

At 83 years of age, Janet Fish still resides and paints in her loft in Soho or at her Vermont farmhouse.  She is exhibited and sold at David Moore Gallery and many others, as well as online, in sites like Artsy and Pinterest. Her works are popular and sell well at auction; many of them are now in private collections. You can view her work in several museums, from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cleveland Museum of Art to the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.  I'll be sure to look for them next time I'm in any one of those cities.  And hope, as I always do, that the Toledo Museum of Art might buy and exhibit her art.

Wrapped in cellophane.

From her "Panoply" exhibition, 2014
 

Some Sources

https://www.facebook.com/groups/864751373634163/? for fabulous  postings of women artists whose art deserves broader public recognition. See also Christa Zaat and Carel Ronk's  https://www.facebook.com/female.artists.in.history/,  pioneers in discovering and posting women artists overtime online. 

https://www.dcmooregallery.com/artists/janet-fish for a good collection of her art over time.

https://www.newyorkartworld.com/reviews/fish.html Good description of  how she paints, her style, her vision.

https://wsimag.com/art/7158-janet-fish-panoply An exhibition. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Fish for a basic biography.