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. 

Grace Carpenter Hudson: Painter of the Pomo Indians of California

I saw this beautiful painting posted by Celebrating Female Artists in History and immediately wanted to know more about the artist, Grace Carpenter Hudson (1865-1937). She was a native Californian, born in Potter Valley, some 130 miles north of San Francisco in rural Mendocino County. Her interest in painting began as a young child, leading her to study art at the new San Francisco School of Design in the early1880s. She painted mostly portraits and landscapes.

It was an exciting time for women culturally. Hundreds of exceptional women artists, whose works were acknowledged and admired, emerged in the public sphere, along with the first generation of college-educated women, the emergence of a revitalized suffrage movement, and the rise of women reform leaders, philosophers, writers.  It was a time when women organized and gathered together to support one another. The "Bonds of Womanhood" propelled women into a myriad of  associations and clubs, women artists among them, rising up like sunflowers in fields across the land. 

These artists, like some of the first women scholars and their work, disappeared from public awareness and public view after their deaths. As men rose to claim the field, and the canon, they often intentionally, often aggressively, pushed women aside. The women artists didn't stop painting, didn't stop creating art,  of course. How could they? It's just that their work wasn't encouraged or exhibited. It wasn't celebrated. It was not shown in galleries. It was not bought by Museums for their collections.  Galleries and auction houses didn't display and sell them. 

Now this is changing. The art is being shown and the talent cannot be ignored.  It cannot be ignored.   

Grace Carpenter advanced her art as pioneer California grew and advanced its status in the United States. After she  married Dr. John Hudson, who migrated from Tennessee to take a job as the physician for the San Francisco and Northern Pacific Railroad, she began painting the local Pomo people, whom she had known since childhood.  John Hudson, also interested  in Native cultures, encouraged her interest. 

Given the atrocities being committed against the native people of America at the time, it's a wonder that this couple seemed to have an interest in documenting and preserving their culture. The painting to the right is of a basket weaver, and the baskets are beautiful.  

 

Hudson's portrait of a sleeping Pomo child in 1881, entitled "National Thorn," turned out to be the first in a numbered series of paintings she did of the Pomo people. I'm not sure what the title means. Is it sarcastic, that a lovely sleeping child could be a thorn in America's side? The popularity of this painting at the time motivated so many copy-cats that Hudson took care to protect its progeny, and her future paintings as well. 

Little Mendocino, Hudson's most
 popular painting. This is a photo of the original.

The series grew to over 680 paintings by the time of her death.

It does seem odd to me that there was this kind of interest in the paintings of  native Americans when at the same time they were being rounded up, thrown on "reservations," killed by US poachers and US soldiers, and forced to "Americanize" their ways in a concerted effort to wipe out their heritage. The Trail of Tears, the Sioux Wars, Little Big Horn where Crazy Horse was killed, Wounded Knee are just a few of the close to one hundred wars and conflicts aimed at exterminating the indigenous people of America.   

While Grace painted the basket weavers,
 her husband John collected them. They
are beautiful baskets.
.

And still these paintings by Grace Hudson became so popular they were copied many times over. When her husband gave up his medical practice to study the Pomo people and follow his deep interests in archeology and ethnography,a famous duo was born. She kept painting, he researched, studied, and collected. In fact it's his collection of California Indian baskets and other Native American artifacts that you can see in the Smithsonian, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, noted for its commitment to diversifying its collection, and the Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah. 

A Grace Hudson Museum? How wonderful. I didn't know about it until doing some research for this blog. I hope I can visit on my next trip to California. The museum houses the manuscripts, artifacts and some paintings of Grace Hudson. A "Sun House," designed and built by the Hudsons, a California bungalow built of redwood, is part of the museum complex.  Here the Hudsons lived in retirement, researched, painted, collected, relaxed, entertained. They adopted the Hopi sun symbol as their family symbol, displayed prominently over the doorway.  The museum is operated by the city of Ukiah. It's designated a California Historical Landmark and listed in the National Register of Historic Places. 

Today, Grace Hudson's work enjoys renewed interest and recognition for its fine and sympathetic portrayals of native peoples. Her paintings sell well through Sothebys and other auction houses. It's a good omen for other women artists, and it pays homage to the persistence of native American culture against great odd that has enriched and continues to enrich our nation. 

Sun House entry door with Hopi sun symbol. Photo by User Binksternet

Some sources:

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/577fcdeab3db2bbb8519136a/t/58ae3f2a1e5b6c4889a00f19/1487814572232/little-mendocino-mad.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hudson a different version, said to be her first of her Pomo Indian paintings, called "National Thorn,." 1891  

https://www.gracehudsonmuseum.org/grace-hudson  LEARN ABOUT GRACE CARPENTER HUDSON'S EARLY CAREER, AND HER MOST FAMOUS PAINTINGS

Little Mendocino
Grace Carpenter Hudson
1892, oil on canvas
36" x 26"
In the collections of the
California Historical Society

The August 2013 issue of Maine Antique Digest features a lengthy article on Grace Hudson and her early career by Karen Holmes, Grace Hudson Museum Registrar and Carpenter Family Historian. "The Sincerest Form of Flattery: Grace Hudson's Little Mendocino and Its Many Copies," traces the history of Hudson's 1892 portrait of a crying Pomo Indian baby that became the artist's best known work. Both the provenance of the original painting and the many copies it mysteriously inspired are thoroughly discussed in this copiously illustrated article. It provides the clearest picture yet of both the first years of Hudson's career, and her working methods as one of America’s earliest commercially successful female artists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Indian_Wars  for information on the American Indian wars, pushing indigenous people of their land and onto reservations. It's a very sad  story. 

https://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/american-indian-wars. For the vicious 19th- century wars, the era Grace Hudson painted the Pomo Indians.

https://www.gracehudsonmuseum.org/the-sun-house