Janet Fish, who died on 11 December at her home in Wells, Vermont, aged 87, stated, “I never bought the argument that painting had to abandon the visible world to be serious.” She didn’t rant against Abstract Expressionism but stepped calmly around it. Preferring to paint a bowl of fruit, a row of jars, a bottle catching the afternoon sun, and insisting that this, too, was where meaning lived.
Fish arrived in New York in the early 1960s, after a stint at Yale School of Art, just as the city was shaking off one orthodoxy and rushing headlong toward another. Abstract Expressionism was losing its grip; Minimalism and Pop were warming up. Her refusal to submit to the cult of heroic abstraction left her isolated—she rented a studio on the Lower East Side and began painting what was there. Fruit on a table. Vegetables near a window. Glass containers doing strange, miraculous things when sunlight passed through them. “I wanted to be a good artist,” she once said. “But I wanted to define what that meant.” It’s a line that could double as her manifesto.
At Yale, she had tried, dutifully, to paint like de Kooning. It didn’t work. The canvases felt false, the gestures borrowed. One of her teachers, Alex Katz, eventually cut through the noise. Paint the landscape, he told her. Forget everything else. She did—starting, improbably, in a cemetery. Then flowers. Then, slowly, the still lifes that would come to define her.
She was not working from photographs, as many later realists would. Fish painted from life, over days, weeks, sometimes months, letting the light change and complicate the objects in front of her. A jar of jelly was never just a jar of jelly. It was coloured under pressure. It was reflection, refraction, and distortion. Time was passing.
Janet Fish Photo Courtesy DC Moore Gallery
By the early 1970s, critics were paying attention. Her first significant solo show, at the Jill Kornblee Gallery in 1971, announced a painter with a cool eye and a surprising sensuality. Hilton Kramer wrote of her “love with transparencies” and her ability to render solid objects that seemed to be “little or nothing but light.” Praise like that mattered in a New York art world still suspicious of anything that looked too closely, too carefully.
Fish pushed on. The compositions grew denser. Glasses and bottles were placed on mirrors, set against landscapes or city views, crowded by flowers, plates, and cracked eggs. In one painting, a goldfish swims alone in a bowl, sunlight breaking the water into fragments. Domestic scenes, yes—but charged, ceremonial almost. Linda Nochlin would later write that Fish conferred “an unprecedented dignity” on these grouped jars and bottles, likening their solemnity to the mosaics of Ravenna. It wasn’t hyperbole. Fish had found a way to make the ordinary feel earned.
Her work entered significant collections—the Met, the Whitney, the National Gallery—and the market followed, if never noisily. Some paintings would later sell for more than $200,000, though money was never the point. What preoccupied Fish, over and over, was light. “I began to perceive that my real interest was light,” she said in 1988. Glass, she realised, could hold it, bend it, make it visible.
That sensitivity to light may have begun earlier than she liked to admit. Born in Boston in 1938 to an art historian father and a sculptor mother, she moved to Bermuda at the age of ten. The island’s colours—sea, sky, flowers—left a permanent mark. Light wasn’t passive. It moved. It pressed in. Energy, she said later, was constantly moving through us. She never seriously considered another life. After Smith College, Yale followed, alongside classmates such as Chuck Close, Richard Serra, and Nancy Graves. In that company, Fish stood apart—not louder, not flashier, just uninterested in playing along. At Yale, she recalled, she became “this girl who’s painting flowers.” People stopped offering feedback. She stopped listening. The silence suited her.
In New York, she stayed on her own path. “I just stuck to my work,” she said. “And one thing led to another.” It usually does.
Fish married three times—first to the painter Rackstraw Downes, then to Edward Levin; both marriages ended in divorce. She met Charles Parness in 1979 and married him decades later, in 2006. He survives her, as well as her sister, Alida Fish, and her brother, Winthrop Fish.
She rarely painted figures. Models arrived late. They fidgeted. Still lifes, by contrast, allowed for a reverie. “You’re thrown completely away from everything else into this world,” she once said. It’s tempting to read that as escapism. It wasn’t. Fish was paying attention—more attention than most.
Janet Fish has revitalised the traditional genre of still life with an expansive body of work that revels in the formal and conceptual possibilities of surprising combinations of objects seen in changing lights.
The cause was a recurrence of a brain haemorrhage that had forced her to stop painting more than a decade ago, according to her husband, the artist Charles Parness. It was a cruel ending for someone whose life’s work had been built around attentiveness: watching light shift, waiting for it to misbehave, then pinning it down in paint.
Janet Fish: Place in Time, November 15, 2025 – April 18, 2026, Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art, Bermuda