Into the light: Mount Holyoke College exhibits the luminous paintings of Janet Fish

By JULIE BUTASH Gazette Contributing Writer

Published on May 09, 2008

You may never look at a Kraft Salad Dressing bottle the same way again.

Through her work with color and movement, Vermont artist Janet Fish seeks to reinvent household objects, giving them personality, spirit and center stage. A retrospective show of her work, "Janet Fish: Into the Light," at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum,includes 30 pieces that span her four-decade career and include her monumental, vividly colored depictions of everyday and often overlooked objects, from Heinz vinegar bottles to bags of bananas to jars of honey.

The exhibit at the South Hadley college, which is on view through June 1, highlights Fish's extraordinary exploration of light, color and movement, a mastery of the painting medium that has landed her work in some of the most prestigious museums in the world.

"I am always looking for color as defined by light and for a kind of sense of energy and life," Fish said, describing her work in a phone interview from her home in southern Vermont. The objects that she paints, whether they are the remains of a breakfast or a cluster of bottles and jars, are often monumental, and dominate the canvas. Candy dishes, vases, and just about everything else that reflects light are her subjects.

Like "Kraft Salad Dressing," which lends a tropical lightness to the banner hanging over the museum's front entrance, Fish's works capture the imagination by bringing items to life through her vivid depiction of light and color. Many of her paintings focus on glass objects, which Fish energizes by exploring how they reflect and fracture light.

"I came to [painting glass] slowly. I started out by throwing apples down on a table and painting them and trying to figure them out. I started changing slowly from one thing to another," said Fish. "I then moved on to painting packages of vegetables, and I got really interested in the movement of light on the package and the transparency. That led to painting glass containers, first of pickles and then of water. I was really interested in the kind of shape and movements that were made."

Color saturates her canvas' visual field, creating a harmonious blend though they are not exaggerated, appear almost whimsical because of their brilliance.

Beyond the humdrum

Fish said that she is able to create that clear, vibrant look of her canvases by compiling a series of brush strokes. By taking it one stroke at a time, Fish said, it becomes a bigger painting translated into clear marks of color and movement. The individual brush strokes come together to create the illusion of transparency.

The show features several different mediums, including oils, watercolors, pastels and graphic media pieces. Early pop-inspired depictions of food, packaged in plastic and glass, are on display as well as some of her more recent pieces, which deal more with layered textures of paint.

The first piece you encounter upon entering the exhibit is one of Fish's more recent works, "Lawn Sale" from 2000. The 4-by-9-foot canvas depicts a mishmash of items: a Barbie doll missing a shoe, a snow globe, badminton rackets and stray birdies clutter the table in the foreground. In the background, Fish depicts people caught in motion: a young girl doing cartwheels; two men shaking out a tablecloth; a boy running. The objects are like those you would encounter at any tag sale, but they are also the most prominent aspects of the painting, reinvented through Fish's brilliant, bold coloration. The grass is not just green, but a lime green. Light touches everything, and the colors explode beyond their usual humdrum hues.

Fish's painting "Kraft Salad Dressing" is what first got the museum thinking about organizing the show, said museum director Marianne Doezema. A recent loan request by the Southern Vermont Arts Center for the museum's "Kraft Salad Dressing," a painting which has been part of the Mount Holyoke College museum's collection since 1983, sparked plans for a collaborative exhibit. When the museum was made aware of the Southern Vermont Arts Center's plan for an expansive show of Fish's work, the museum was hooked.

"I received a loan request from an art center in Vermont, and they were planning a very interesting retrospective of Janet Fish's work, and they wanted to include that work ("Kraft Salad Dressing")," explained Doezema "There was a gap in our schedule, and there really hasn't been a show of realist painting. And we thought how interesting it would be if we could get in on that show."

Following its run at Mount Holyoke, the show will move to the artist's home state of Vermont.

Lifetime of art

Fish was born into a family of artists, and she followed suit from an early age.

"I always planned to be an artist from when I was a child," explained Fish. "I kept sort of doing art."

Fish attended Smith College in Northampton, where she received her bachelor's degree in printmaking in 1960.

"I really had wanted to go to art school, but my parents were determined I get a college degree, so I picked a school that had a big art department, which Smith did," Fish reflected. "When you're in school, you are basically exploring different mediums and different techniques. I basically took every class I could."

Fish continued at Yale University in New Haven, where she initially studied sculpture but received her master's degree in fine art in painting in 1963.

"I took painting in college and then I really started focusing on it in graduate school," she explained. "I wanted to be a sculptor initially, but I changed my mind my first year at Yale. They were into a more minimal procedural kind of sculpture and I thought that would be too restrictive, so I went into painting."

Since then, Fish has exhibited her work at many major art institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, both in New York City, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

At a February panel discussion at the museum Bridget Moore, owner of the DC Moore Gallery in New York City, and artists James McGarrell, of Newbury, Vt., and Sondra Freckleton, of Oneonta, N.Y, spoke about Fish's work.

Moore, whose gallery represents Fish, said she "is always waiting for the light to energize the object" in her paintings. She went on to explain that Fish, "has retained through her whole career an interest in surface, in brushwork, in the integrity of the brushwork. Her work is unabashedly visual and beautiful."

Freckleton pointed to some of Fish's paintings, which stretch the limits of what might be called still lifes: portrayals of cats caught in mid-air leaps and children playing in the sunlight.

She's "trying to paint a not-so-still still life," said Frecklton.

Doezema said she believes museum-goers will be dazzled by the exhibit. "I think it is going to be a revelation," she said. "It is just beautiful and fun."