Janet Fish is an American painter whose still life paintings seem to radiate color. Using a high chroma palette, in combinations that in lesser hands might fall into the garish, Fish produces harmonious compositions that vibrate with energy and light.
She often chooses as her subjects objects that are translucent, transparent or reflective, in particular colored glass. She surrounds these with flowers, bright cloth patterns and other objects in brilliant hues, balanced with strategically placed rich darks, and somehow manages to tame those wild arrays of color into images that seem at once preternaturally intense and perfectly naturalistic.
Fish is widely recognized and her work is in the collections of major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
There are a few catalogs and collections of her work; Janet Fish: Paintings by Vincent Katz is in print and readily available.
Fish is represented by the DC Moore Gallery in NY, which also showcases a nice selection of her work online. I’ve listed other galleries and additional resources below.
I’ve had the pleasure of seeing some of her works in person. They are often fairly large in scale and striking.
In rooms in which there are works by several artists, hers inevitably stand out and command your attention. Unlike many contemporary works about which that can be said, Fish’s paintings also reward extended viewing; small areas can be looked at in detail as wonderfully arranged shapes of color and tone. Her command of the arrangement of elements of color can be seen even more clearly in her graphic work.
