Said Janet Fish, quoted in "Janet Fish, Painter of Luminous Still Lifes, Dies at 87/From her student days, she stubbornly refused to follow popular artistic trends. Instead, she spent decades exploring the effects of light on glass" (NYT)(gift links, because there are some pretty cool photos of Fish's paintings).
"In the eyes of just about everyone at Yale, Ms. Fish later recalled, she was just 'this girl who’s painting flowers.' Upon arriving in New York in 1965, she continued to follow her own path. 'I just stuck to my work,' she said. 'And one thing led to another.'"
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Give a man a fish and you feed him for one day. Teach a woman to paint and you'll have 60 years of flowers.
A quick search for Janet Fish's paintings finds "Sasha with a Bowl of Candy" at Madison MOCA. Does every city have a MOCA now?
YouTube: The Feynman Way has a video on how light and glass interact. "Light explores ALL probabilities at once."
"Five Bertolli Bottles" is a revelation. Olive oil and urine are the same color?
read her biography, her talent, her accomplishments were stunning. First woman to get a MFA from Yale. Look who she went to school with. Blows my mind. an original.
"I just got a red, white, and boner"/"I think I got a little freedom erection."
Likewise, Fish's art with all that light through glass gave me a pria-prism.
I'm a simple man, and I've always been most impressed with an artist's ability to create light with a brush. It's some kind of magic, and I wish I had leared it in my youth.
This is something that AI can never do. Create a visual of how we see things.
My best friend in High School was a very talented artist. At 18 he took a Greyhound bus to NYC. He spent his first night sleeping in a churchyard, under some bushes. He managed to get into Parsons School of Design. I went and visited him there. Everyone was making these paintings that looked like sections of sidewalk. I mean, literally, they were trying to make a painting that depicted a small section of a sidewalk, in great and colorful detail. He was still doing pictures of people. But a year or so later, he was painting sidewalks. Complete academic garbage. The professionalization of art.
The comparison to mosaics is apt. "Light" in Ms. Fish's paintings consists of many "color spots" coming together like colors of objects registered in the human eye. This way of painting from life is essentially scientific and rational, hence the near absence of sentiment. It was a continuation or "update" of Impressionism, with the painter's ego staying out of the way in the process. When the color spots are arranged as close as the painter's eye objectively sees, form, space, and light fall into place, giving the impression of natural appearance so it's more accurate to call it naturalism instead of realism. In a documentary about Chuck Close, Ms. Fish's contemporary and fellow Yale classmates, there is talk about the "non-teaching" approach the instructors took, ostensibly to allow students to "find their own way." Janet Fish and Chuck Close at Yale, along with others who later became accomplished painters, had no choice but to find their own path, and many stuck to it for life. Chuck Close famously only painted portraits of his fellow artists including Ms. Fish.
Nice work, luminous.
My 3” iPhone screen doesn’t do her work justice. Some things have to be seen in person.
Mrs. Rackstraw Downes, briefly. Maybe that should have been Dale Chihuly. Just from those very few samples with the NYT article, the early pieces are more exciting than that later one, from 2004. Like Philip Glass in that way. So much was going on in those first decades of her career. Much of it in that same place. Nice; RIP Janet Fish.
I'm a simple man, and I've always been most impressed with an artist's ability to create light with a brush. It's some kind of magic, and I wish I had leared it in my youth.
Minneapolis is the place to go if you want to lear about things.
Beautiful art. I liked her comparison of painting a still life with contemplation. True.
“Still life always seemed, to me, the wrong word,” she said, “because it’s not dead.” (See Feynman above 👆🏽)
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