Janet Fish is a contemporary American artist. She paints still life paintings

Still life

A still life is a work of art depicting mostly inanimate subject matter, typically commonplace objects which may be either natural or man-made...

, some of light bouncing off reflective surfaces, such as plastic wrap containing solid objects and empty or partially filled glassware.

Biography

Born in a family of artists—her mother a sculptress, father a painter, uncle a wood carver—Fish grew up in Bermuda and knew early on that she wanted to pursue the visual arts. Pursuing sculpture first, by 1963 she was painting.

Her education includes:

• BA 1960, Smith College
  Smith College
  Smith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
  
  , Northampton, Massachusetts
  Northampton, Massachusetts
  The city of Northampton is the county seat of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, United States. As of the 2010 census, the population of Northampton's central neighborhoods, was 28,549...
  
  .
• The Skowhegan School of Art
  The Skowhegan School of Art
  The Skowhegan School of Art is a nine week summer artists' residency located in Madison, Maine and founded there in 1947.The school invites applicants to submit artworks as slides, which are then judged by a jury of school governors and artists. During the summer work period, artists are given...
  
  , Skowhegan, Maine
  Skowhegan, Maine
  Skowhegan is the county seat of Somerset County, Maine, United States. As of the 2000 census, the town population was 8,824. Every August, Skowhegan hosts the annual Skowhegan State Fair, the oldest continuous state fair in the United States...
  
  , 1961.
• FA, MFA, Yale University
  Yale University
  Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
  
  , New Haven, Connecticut
  New Haven, Connecticut
  New Haven is the second-largest city in Connecticut and the sixth-largest in New England. According to the 2010 Census, New Haven's population increased by 5.0% between 2000 and 2010, a rate higher than that of the State of Connecticut, and higher than that of the state's five largest cities, and...
  
  , 1963.

She is interested in painting light and a concept she has on occasion called "packaging." For instance, if she paints a jar of pickles, the jar becomes "packaging," and this can translate into a searching for the light that describes the jar, and a subsequent translation into color.

Excerpts from an interview:

Janet Fish: "When I got to New York, I was simply trying to figure out what I wanted painting to be. There were problems with what I could do. I was trying to paint something three-dimensional on a two-dimensional surface. I threw some apples down on the table and started painting them. The paintings took a long, long time. Slowly I began enlarging the things and then focusing more on the object than on the surroundings. I went from that to painting packages, supermarket things. I liked the way the plastic was going over the solid objects, and I liked how it broke the forms up. I was trying to define my interests and I was eliminating everything that I wasn't interested in. Trying to get more and more toward something I wanted to paint. So this was kind of a reductive approach."

Interviewer: "That was sort of a self-imposed process?"

Janet Fish: "Yeah, I'd do a painting, then another, and I'd compare them. I'd take down the bad painting and leave the better one up and keep pushing along that way. From there I found some jars of pickles, and it was a similar problem, solid object covered by a transparent surface. Once I started doing that, I got really interested in the light coming through the liquid. And that took me into painting bottles and jars, things like that."

Interviewer: "Do you go from one subject to another?"

Janet Fish: "No. It's just that the packages got me interested in reflections, and then that became more defined as light, and then as I painted the glass, I started to paint light. My subject was what happened within the object. The paintings at that time weren't about the environment at all, but were about the objects themselves."

Interviewer: "Color obviously plays an important role in your work."

Janet Fish: "Color is light. Color gets the character of light."

Interviewer: "When you are setting up, do you keep consistent lighting?"

Janet Fish: "No, I don't. I like to set up in a window, and I prefer it with direct light so it's always moving and changing. It keeps me awake and the light changes the forms and brings in new ideas. Sometimes there is a moment when the light does something in one place that is really exciting. I put it in. I might use the light of another time in another spot. I am not a camera."

Interviewer: "How do you control the light in a painting when you're working like that?"

Janet Fish: "Sometimes I decide on a specific direction where the light might be coming from. But basically I play, I work with what happens. It's really more fun to paint moving light than still light."

Fish's work has been characterized as photorealist

Photorealism

Photorealism is the genre of painting based on using the camera and photographs to gather information and then from this information creating a painting that appears photographic...

 and has also been associated with new realism.

Recognition

• American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, 1994
• Aspen Art Museum
  Aspen Art Museum
  Founded in 1979, the Aspen Art Museum is a non-collecting contemporary art museum located in the historic mountain community of Aspen, Colorado....
  
   Woman in Arts Award, 1993
• Hubbard Museum Award, 1991
• Australia Council for Arts Grant, 1975
• Harris Award, Chicago Biennale, 1974
• MacDowell Fellowship
  MacDowell Colony
  The MacDowell Colony is an art colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, U.S.A., founded in 1907 by Marian MacDowell, pianist and wife of composer Edward MacDowell. She established the institution and its endowment chiefly with donated funds...
  
  , 1968, '69 and '72

Sources

• Carol Kort, Liz Sonneborn - A to Z of American Women in the Visual Arts

External links

• Janet Fish Interview in Art Interview Online Magazine