Janet Fish

Tropical Still Life

Abalone Shell and Tangerine

Janet Fish (b. 1938) ranks as one of America's foremost painters of contemporary still life.

Fish paints recognizable everyday objects in their surroundings. Light however is the element that transforms her paintings from the ordinary to the extraordinary.

Each object in each painting is bathed in a flickering field of light and color shapes. Light is captured within shapes and is altered by them. Light is the element that creates a unity of separate objects. No one paints the minimalism of glass with the maximum amount of color in quite the way that Fish does. As it dances across a painted surface, the light creates a rippling energy and movement.

Janet Fish progressed from abstraction to figurative painting after her graduation from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1962. While at Yale, she was particularly inspired by the California painter, Richard Diebenkorn. In succeeding years, she has worked in a variety of media including oil, watercolors and printmaking.

Rather than creating preliminary sketches, Fish arranges and rearranges objects, watching the light fall on them over a series of hours. "What matters is the complex relationship of color and form from one area of the painting to another," says Janet Fish.

The repetition of oval and vertical shapes of glasses and goblets, the myriad fruits and flowers, the interwoven patterns are portrayed with an artistic freedom that form extraordinary compositions of color and light.