Known for large still lifes of common objects with bright colors--lime green, pink, yellow--, Janet Fish works from a loft in the SoHo section of New York City and takes pride in the fact that she paints "forbidden subjects," realistic still lifes. Her work, expressive of her highly independent spirit, is a reaction against the pure abstraction that has been prevalent for so many years in the American art world, especially in New York.

She was born in Boston into a family of artists. Her grandfather was impressionist Clark Voorhees; her mother was a sculptor, which Janet originally wanted to be; and her sister, Alida, is a photographer. Janet, who grew to be nearly six-feet tall, spent much time in her childhood at the Old Lyme Colony in Connecticut with her artist grandfather and there was much influenced by American Impressionism.

At Smith College, she studied sculpture and printmaking with Leonard Baskin and also studied sculpture at Yale University. She did her first still lifes in the late 1960s and early hit upon her signature style, which was reflective surfaces often depicted in plastic wrap, glassware, and mirrored surfaces. She also showed brand names such as Windex, which aligned her with pop artists.

In the 1980s, she began spending much time in rural Vermont with her long-time companion, painter Charles Parness, and on these trips transports from SoHo the many still life props she needs for her paintings.

However, her interest in realism and the way light plays on surfaces set her apart from the prevalent modernists, and that decision has literally paid off because her work has been acquired by numerous collectors and major museums including the Chicago Art Institute, the Boston Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York.

It is said that in her work she retained the energy she learned from the Abstract Expressionists. She has loose and linear brushstrokes with elements of abstraction, but most of her subjects are recognizable such as bags of junk food, crying children, cans of beer, etc.

Sources include:
ARTnews
Art in America

Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1938, Janet Fish was raised in Bermuda. She hails from a long line of artists and art enthusiasts. Her mother was a sculptor, her father an art history teacher and her grandfather an American Impressionist. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Smith College, and was one of the first women to receive a Master of Fine Arts from Yale University in 1963. In 1971 she had her first one-woman exhibition and quickly established herself as one of New York's leading artists.

Fish, who thinks of herself as a "painterly realist," is perhaps the foremost innovator of modern still life painting. She has been widely acclaimed for her unique ability to capture the beauty of everyday objects, especially colored glass, fruit and flowers. Her intensely energetic works, predominantly oil on canvas, are primarily interested in light, atmosphere, motion and lush, saturated color. Many convey a benevolence and generosity of spirit or an optimism disaffected by irony.

In recent years, Fish has held solo exhibitions with, among others, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY; New Jersey Center for Visual Arts, Summit, NJ; Armory Art Center, West Palm Beach, FL; the Samuel P. Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; and the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA.

Fish has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most notably the 1993 American Artist Achievement Award for Oils; MacDowell Colony Fellowships in 1968, 1969 and 1972; and the Harris Award at the Chicago Biennale in 1974. Her work can be seen in more than 58 premier U.S. and international museum collections, including: The Art Institute of Chicago, the Australian National Gallery, The Cleveland Museum of Art, The Dallas Museum of Fine Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Milwaukee Art Museum, The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

Corporate collections include AT&T, American Airlines, Amstar, Chase Manhattan Bank, Heublein, and IBM.

Janet Fish was born in 1938 in Boston and raised in Bermuda. She was practically destined to become an artist, being the granddaughter of Clark Voorhees, a well-known American Impressionist painter, and the daughter of a sculptor and potter.

Fish studied sculpture and printmaking at Smith College where she received a bachelor's degree. Afterwards, she attended Yale University's School of Art and Architecture and was one of the first women to receive a master's degree there.

During the late 50's and early 60's, art schools were dominated by the theories of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism and Smith and Yale were no exceptions. Fish was greatly influenced by this training, but turned to figurative painting, as did many artists of this generation.

As a student at Yale, Fish's realistic approach to art was not encouraged. Realism was considered inferior to abstract or conceptual art at this time. However, in her heart, Fish knew she was a realist.

After graduation, Fish continued painting figurative compositions, focusing on still lifes. She moved to New York and soon found gallery representation. Her career as an artist took off rather suddenly. Since this time her work has been collected and shown by many major institutions throughout the world.

Exhibitions:
DC Moore Gallery, NY, 2002, 2000,1998,
The Columbus Museum, GA, 2000
Ft. Lauderdale Museum of Art, 1998
Grace Borgenicht Gallery, NY 1995
The Museum of Arts & Sciences, GA, 1993
Aspen Art Museum, CO, 1992-93
Orlando Museum of Art, FL
Smith College, MA, 1986
Hollins College, VA 1985
Delaware Art Museum, DE, 1982
Hogarth Galleries, Sydney, Australia, 1975
Galerie Alexandra Monett, Brussels, Belgium, 1974
Galerie De Gestlo, Hamburg, Germany, 1970
National Academy of Design, NY 2001, 1999, 1996, 1993, 1991, 1980, 1977, 1971
Art Institute of Chicago, IL, 1999
Bruce Museum, CT 1998
The National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1994, 1991
Boston Museum of Fine Arts, MA, 1994, 1992
Museum of Modern Art, NY 1987
Butler Institute of American Art, OH, 1986
The Brooklyn Museum, NY 1986
Whitney Museum of American Art, 1984
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY 1982

Collections:
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
Art Institute of Chicago, IL
Butler Institute of American Art, OH
Knoxville Museum of Art, TN
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia
Newark Museum, NJ
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, PA
Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
Yale University, CT

Janet Fish was born in 1938 in Boston, Massachusetts. She received a BA from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1960. The following year she studied painting at the Skowhegan Art School in Maine where she met visiting painter/critic Alex Katz. Katz became a life-long mentor, encouraging her to expand her horizons beyond the heavy influence of Abstract Expressionism she encountered in graduate school. (1) However, the fluid brushstroke, brilliant color and "organic" approach to filling the canvas that she explored while immersed in Abstract Expressionism continued to influence Fish's subsequent work, both landscape and still life paintings.

She received a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from Yale in 1963. Among her classmates was a new generation of artists whose work arose also from Abstract Expressionism: Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, Richard Serra, Brice Marden, and Rackstraw Downs.

Fish has become well known for executing large, colorful still life paintings of glasses and other reflective objects placed on cloth-covered table tops. While her work is obviously influenced by the 17th century Dutch still-life tradition celebrating the bounty of the harvest and the beauty of nature, it also reveals French Impressionist influence in the intertwining of light-filled strokes of vibrant color. This technique provides for smooth yet lively gestures that move across the surface of the canvas, drawing the viewer's eyes from object to object.

Fish's interest in exploring an active canvas can be traced in part to her youth, growing up in Bermuda, which she describes as "a small, crowded island… [where] there's a profusion, a density, of vegetation which might have led me toward the very active surfaces I paint." (2)

Janet Fish is considered a "new realist" painter in that she is less concerned with copying the superficial likeness of things in an academic way than she is with expressing the light, colors and textures perceived in the natural world. (3) Her approach to painting reflects her experience with the active canvas of Abstract Expressionism as well as her deliberate choice to paint real objects.

In 1997, Fish's Raspberries and Goldfish was included in "Still Life: The Object in American Art 1915-1995", an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Curator Lowery Sims noted the skepticism that surrounded the new American Realism, even 40 years after its introduction. "We may be a little suspicious these days of the pictorialism in realist painting. Right now, there's a greater interest in the objective gaze that captures the more gritty aspects of life. There's a tendency to favor theory over the formal aspects of painting. When I was putting together this show, I noticed how Janet hadn't just randomly arranged these flowers…the painting was deliberate in its compositional and lighting choices. There was a lot more going on than met the eye. It was more than skillfully capturing visual effects." (4)

Paintings by Janet Fish have been exhibited throughout the U.S. and overseas. They form part of the permanent collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; The Boston Museum of Fine Arts; the Art Institute of Chicago; Columbus Museum; and many other public and private collections.


Sources:
1. Judith Stein. Janet Fish: Recent Paintings and Watercolors (exhibition catalogue). New York, NY: D.C. Moore Gallery, 1998, 6.

2. Carter Ratcliff. Janet Fish (exhibition catalogue), New York, NY, Robert Miller Gallery, 1985.

3. Les Reker. Janet Fish (introduction to exhibition catalogue), New York, NY: D. C. Moore Gallery, 2000.

4. Cynthia Nadelman. "Forbidden Fruit," ARTnews, October 1999, 175. staff, Columbus Museum

Janet Fish was born in Boston in 1938, into a family of artists. As a child, she grew up in Bermuda from 1949 to 1963.

She studied art at Smith College, Northampton until 1960, at Yale University, New Haven at Alex Katz and Philip Pearlstein until 1963, in 1959 at Art Students League, New York and 1962 at Skowhegan Art School. In 1994, she was awarded the America Academy of the Arts and Letters Award.

Today she lives, and paints in New York and Vermont.