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Janet Fish is best known for her still life paintings, but also sometimes includes figures and landscapes in her work. Her richly colored paintings and prints are virtuoso performances of painting and printmaking. At Yale she took Josef Albers' color course, The Interaction of Color, which was later made into a book which has influenced generations of artists.

She has shown her work in many major art institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago, and at many venues around the world. She has also won fellowships and awards, including American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, 1994, and a MacDowell Fellowships in 1968, 1968 and 1972. Her work has been published in several books - The Prints of Janet Fish, by Linda Konheim Kramer, Janet Fish by Garret Henry, and Janet Fish: Paintings
by Vincent Katz. She is currently represented by D.C. Moore Gallery in New York City, and divides her time between her Soho loft and her farmhouse in Vermont. Her paintings reflect her indoor and outdoor domestic life, often containing still life objects from her collections of glassware and other objects. 

Her colors have become increasingly saturated and intense, however finely tuned are their harmonies and relationships. The intricate and precise variable shapes of her colors are also painterly, which provides a tension of duality in her work. Fish is separated from other colorful still life painters by her mastery of formal elements - color relationships, light, composition and space.  Her brushstrokes also, though seemingly realistically painted, seem closer to the Impressionist use of broken color to construct form and compositions.

Fish may work from photographs, but it appears that often her paintings are composites of many photographs, which she rearranges to form her compositions. Her paintings seem to have more of a painter's than a photographer's eye. She "paints what she sees," but in the course of painting seems to freely alter what is in front of her to suit the composition and meaning of the image, as well as to heighten the impressions of color and light.

Her work is beautiful and intense, her passion is clearly shown in every creation she produces.

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