Janet Fish, American (b. 1938)

Janet Fish was born in Boston, Massachusetts and was raised on the island of Bermuda. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, graduated from Smith College in 1960, and was one of the first women to receive her M.F.A. from Yale University in 1963.

Learning to paint at a time when a more intellectual form of painting was popular, Fish remains true to a more realistic study of objects, color, and the physical sensation of painting. Even so, actual reality is just a starting point for her prints and paintings: she begins with a still life, but is unafraid to see where exploration of shape or color takes the final work. Her images are saturated with intense, vibrant color; the relationships between colors and forms are more important to her than a realistic view of her subject. To Fish, "everything is part of something else. So I work to present a situation in which things are interrelated and connected through a flow of movement, light, and color from one form to another." The result is work that seems natural to the eye yet is very much an artist’s take on the world.