Biography fish janet

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. The abstract qualities of forms are dominant - the shapes, the reflections, the spaces through and between them, and the colors.

Pretty objects are given the same importance in the images as common objects - a beautiful obsidian vase and some red cellophane. This reflects the artistic tradition of including objects from "high" and "low" culture. She says she welcomes beauty when it shows up. Fruit, flowers and glassware offer the viewer a sumptuous visual feast in every image, though sometimes her works are of unglamorous subjects, such as scaffolding on a building and a stack of plates.

Her subjects really are color, light, visual movement and space, and the content of her work is perhaps life itself, seen in isolated moments of unusual juxtapositions and casual glances. It is the work of a true painter, who sees potential paintings many times throughout the average day. Her use of color is extraordinary - probably resulting from her color studies with Albers, and its high key perhaps comes from her Bermuda childhood.

In many of her paintings, there are few areas of "neutral" colors - rather there are only intense, rich colors that nevertheless live together in harmony. I read where she said that still life offers a painter the most visually innovative possibilities, and as a painter of still life, I agree with her. You can literally create your own world, even a world filled with combinations impossible in "real" life.

Biography fish janet

You can put a far-off galaxy of stars, for example, next to a glass of lemonade. And this implies juxtapositions - poetic, Pop, metaphysical, and more. It also offers an opportunity to use the pure colors in your paint box - the bright reds, magentas, yellows and ultramarines. Those colors in a landscape would create a Fauvist image - and that has already been done!

In a portrait, they would become garish. But in a still life, they can fit perfectly. The possibilities of composition in still life are endless, and forever interesting. In particular, Fish sometimes uses the vertical format for her still lifes, which I also use. I was influenced in this by the interiors of Bonnard and by Persian miniature paintings.

This is a more contemporary version of the still life, which in past centuries was commonly in the horizontal format. The foreground and background positive and negative spaces in her work are often shifting in space and importance, an attribute common to painting since the middle 19th century. This results in unusual scale and spatial effects, such as in the painting Dog Days , where a dog in the yard appears smaller than the pieces of watermelon on the table; it also offers a whimsical juxtaposition of unexpected and unnoticed casual life experiences.

As a painter, I know how much fun it is to include these bon mots in "serious" art - these representations of contemporary life in our consumer culture - they are poignant, trivial and ubiquitous. We paint what we see around us, regardless of high or low cultural value. Fish's use of transparent objects, such as glass and cellophane, also provide a contemporary sense of atmospheric spatial depth, without the traditional use of chiaroscuro light and shade to depict volumes in space.

This combining of foreground and background also produces images which are both still life and landscape, in such works as Dog Days and Geese in Flight. In the latter image, wild geese in flight dominate the top half of the painting, over an object-laden table. For me, this juxtaposition of wildlife and manmade nature is somehow poetic - and the movement of space forward and backward in the image adds to this simultaneity - it reverses the normal hierarchy of our experience.

Here, in the painter's world, everything is equal, and everything is capable of creating in us the impulse to paint it. As poets arrange words to elicit contrasts, painters combine images to evoke meanings or atmospheres, often unexpected, that may have actually been seen in a Kodak moment outdoors. She has said that we see what we are looking for.

It was a set of rules. Fish largely rejected the Abstract Expressionism endorsed by her Yale instructors feeling "totally disconnected" from it and desiring instead the "physical presence of objects". Undaunted by the dogma of pure abstraction which reigned in her formative years, Janet Fish connected with images in the real world. Rooted in the Modernist formal tradition and the Dutch still life genre tradition, her work adheres to the world of concrete contemporary experience.

Fish's simple, familiar subjects are rendered with formal complexity, richness of detail and the vibrant, tropical palette of her childhood. Fish is interested in painting light and a concept she has on occasion called "packaging", such as jars, cellophane, and wrappers. Among her other favorite subjects are everyday objects, especially various kinds of clear glassware, either empty or partially filled with liquids such as water, liquor, or vinegar.

Examples range from glasses, bottles, goblets, and jars [ 3 ] to a fishbowl filled with water and a goldfish. Although Fish's work has been characterized as Photorealist or New Realism , [ 18 ] she does not consider herself a photorealist. Elements, such as her composition and use of color, demonstrate the view of a painter rather than a photographer.

Fish had two short-lived marriages, which she claims were unsuccessful at least partly due to her high ambitions and her reluctance to be a "good conventional housewife". Fish's first solo show was at Rutherford, New Jersey 's Fairleigh Dickinson University in and her first New York exhibition followed two years later. Below is a selection of the exhibitions of her work.

Art critic Gerrit Henry has described Fish as the acknowledged master of the contemporary still life. A writer for The New York Times said that Fish's "ambitious still life painting helped resuscitate realism in the 's" and that she imbued everyday objects with a "bold optical and painterly energy". In an interview, American painter Eric Fischl spoke of his admiration for Janet Fish: "She's one of the most interesting realists of her generation.

Her work is a touchstone, and tremendously influential. Anyone who deals with domestic still life has to go through her, she's very important. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Her paintings from the late 60s and early 70s, studies of transparent objects, begin 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 the subject matter or story line, is of the least importance, for her meaning is determined by tone, gesture, color, light, and scale. Grasses and Blue Bird Cage , Oil on canvas 70 x 60 inches. Pinwheels and Poppies , Oil on canvas 64 x 70 inches. Although Fish's work has been characterized as Photorealist or New Realism, she does not consider herself a photorealist.

Elements, such as her composition and use of color, demonstrate the view of a painter rather than a photographer. Fish had two short-lived marriages, which she claims were unsuccessful at least partly due to her high ambitions and her reluctance to be a "good conventional housewife". Fish's first solo show was at Rutherford, New Jersey's Fairleigh Dickinson University in and her first New York exhibition followed two years later.

Fish exhibited over 75 times nationally and internationally. Below is a selection of the exhibitions of her work. Art critic Gerrit Henry has described Fish as the acknowledged master of the contemporary still life. A writer for The New York Times said that Fish's "ambitious still life painting helped resuscitate realism in the 's" and that she imbued everyday objects with a "bold optical and painterly energy".

Critic Vincent Katz concurs, stating that Fish's career "can be summed up as the revitalization of the still-life genre, no mean feat when one considers that still life has often been considered the lowest type of objective painting".