Janet Fish: Color, Light, Pattern features sixteen big, bold paintings created by the Janet Fish between 2000 and 2008.For nearly five decades, she has created dramatic still-life paintings that are a tour de force in contemporary realist art. She combines lessons from abstraction with the traditional devices of color, light, pattern, and texture to produce paintings that are vivid in color and vibrant in form.

Born in Boston in 1938 and raised in Bermuda, Fish grew up in a family of artists in a house cluttered with objets d’art. At an early age she developed dreams of becoming a sculptor, creating pottery in her mother’s ceramics studio and hunting for sculptural treasures on the beach, such as shells and sand-wash glass. Eventually, however, her dreams of sculpting turned into a passion for painting.

After graduating from Smith College in 1960, Fish enrolled in the MFA program at Yale University, where she attended class with such notable artists as Chuck Close, Rackstraw Downes, Nancy Graves, Robert Mangold, Brice Marden, and Richard Serra. Although abstract expressionism was at its height of influence during her time at Yale, Fish preferred realism. Upon completing her degree, she moved to New York City and focused her talents on creating contemporary still-life paintings.

Fish delights in filling the entire picture plane with everyday items. She still hunts for treasures—pieces with unique shapes, colors, and textures—at stores, auctions, and yard sales. In addition to inanimate objects, she also incorporates large, colorful flowers into her still-life compositions. While she carefully chooses and arranges her objects for formal rather than symbolic reasons, she is aware that by playing with associations in subtle ways, themes and unexpected meanings can emerge.

Although Fish is fixated on the arrangement of objects, color and light are the true subjects of her paintings and the hallmarks of her signature style. Unlike impressionist painters, she is not interested in the effects of daylight on subject matter. Rather, she focuses on the luminosity coming from within, surrounding, and hovering over her chosen vehicles of light. While Fish’s paintings can display either a limited palette or a full spectrum of color, her color choices create a rhythm that unifies her compositions. Her bright and varied colors play with each other to express a movement that directs the viewer’s eye through her artwork.

After nearly half a century as an artist, Fish continues to paint in studios in Vermont and New York City.