American artist Janet Fish, known for her luminous realist portraits of everyday objects, died at her home in Wells, Vermont at 87 on December 11th. Her death was announced by DC Moore Gallery, which represents the artist.
Fish’s husband, artist Charles Parness, told the New York Times that the cause was a recurrence of a brain hemorrhage.
Fish painted hyper-luminous still lifes that revel in reflections and saturated color, transforming everyday glassware and fruit into sensuous objects. Her works invite slow looking, using excess and clarity to make perception itself part of the subject.
Born in 1938 in Boston, Fish was raised by art historian Peter Fish and sculptor Forence Whistler Fish. Her grandfather was the American Impressionist painter Clark Greenwood Voorhees. Janet moved to Bermuda with her family at age 10, where she remained until she enrolled at Smith College in Massachusetts in 1956. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, she pursued painting at Yale, earning a master’s degree.
At Yale, she worked alongside notable artists including Nancy Graves, Chuck Close, and Richard Serra, s. During her time in school, Fish admired painters like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, but she never resonated as an artist with Abstract Expressionism. Instead, her instructor, Alex Katz, encouraged her to paint a landscape. She did, and continued to paint flowers throughout her career.
Fish arrived in New York City in 1965. In the late 1960s and ’70s, she arranged everyday objects beneath the sunlit window of her sixth-floor SoHo walk-up, using the space itself as both studio and subject.
Fish relocated to Vermont in 1979 and adopted a horizontal format, incorporating people and animals into her paintings for the first time. One painting, Football (1986), features a chaotic lunch spread, a television playing a football game, and a newspaper open to the sports section. Her dog sits underneath this scattered table. She painted until 2009, when she stopped due to her health.
Fish’s work is held in prestigious collections, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
