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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