III

A passion for detail, for seeing, is something we can observe at certain periods and in certain cultures.  Certain people seem to have a need for close depiction of observed reality, as it is interpreted at that time, while others are more interested in symbolic or spiritual manifestations of imagery.  The Dutch were among the earliest in the first category.  A remarkable illuminated manuscript from the 15th century, The Hours of Catherine of Cleves, is famous for presaging interests that would dominate the golden period of Dutch painting.  There are many instances in this work of detailed realistic depictions decorating the borders of images of saints.  Pretzels, fishing nets, bird cages, archery equipment, and fish are all given elaborate treatment.  One page, that depicts Saint Vincent, has a border of butterflies and vines with berries.  Eight butterflies, of several different species, are painted with exquisite attention to coloration and form.  The butterfly has a symbolic significance, standing in many belief systems for the soul, in particular its immortality, appropriate for the saint known as the invincible martyr.
            The page depicting St. Ambrose has a border of eleven types of mussel, along with a crab, painted with a verisimilitude that is astonishing. [repro].  The mussels may stand for the eleven good apostles, with the crab being Judas, but they also represent the Dutch interest in science and maritime exploration.8   Shells were often used in later Dutch still-lifes as references to the exotic locales from which they came and which Holland had dominated with its fleet.  Empty shells can symbolize the transience of earthly life in Vanitas images meant to remind viewers of the need for moral rectitude.  Objects in still lifes, including shells with the living animal intact, can also have erotic overtones, and even the Vanitas paintings can be calls to make the most of life while there is still time, “Carpe Diem,” as Horace’s famous poem has it.
            Individual flowers had specific connotations for the Dutch, and some people argue that their combinations were meant to be read based on the interactions of these meanings.  An entire book has been devoted to the topic9 , yet its author, Paul Taylor, cautions against too dogmatic a reading of these floral still-lifes.  In most cases, we do not have evidence of the artist’s express symbolic intent, and the intricacies of interpretation are always open to debate.  It is clear, however, that symbolism played a part in the Dutch thinking about certain objects that appeared in paintings.  Erwin Panofsky used the term “disguised symbolism” to refer to commonplace objects which nevertheless have symbolic content.  His term is attractive as it allows for a degree of nuance both in the painting and its interpretation.  As we shall see, disguised symbolism, or hidden significances, increasingly play a role in Janet Fish’s still lifes, as they become more and more elaborate.
            To give an example of the complexity of Dutch symbolism, it is worthwhile to quote Taylor’s analysis of Maria van Oosterwyck’s 1668 painting Vanitas: “[There is] no doubt as to the significance of the painted bouquet.  Ranged around it are a skull, an hourglass, a recorder (since notes fade in the air), a rattle (the useless chatter of daily life), a bag of money (for riches are not for ever), some half-eaten maize and corn (the grass withereth), a celestial globe (to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven), a pen and ink pot (the Lord knoweth the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain)...”  The relative subtlety of these symbolic elements should be noted, as it is possible to look at this still life without those elements being paramount in one’s mind.
            There was a side to Dutch still-life reminiscent of Fish’s close observation of shape and texture.  There was also an artificiality to Dutch still-life, in that the objects were often recorded individually, to compile a stock of images, from which the artist would create combinations, often using the identical object in various paintings.  In a similar way, Fish  has used a particular lamp in a number of settings. In certain Dutch flower paintings, artificiality is made clear by the fact that the flowers included bloom at different times of year.  Fish’s paintings have often made use of artificial combination of light effects from separate points in time over the same group of objects.
            In the 17th century, the importance of allegory and symbolism in still life was waning, balanced by a sophisticated appreciation of decorative motif and technical brilliance, as well as a pleasure in seeing represented the signs of the good life.  Representing the visible world with an almost scientific exactness was a goal, creating a believable illusion of reality, yet the aesthetic pleasure of forms and light had become a goal in itself.  This is not say the aesthetic took the place of the symbolic; merely that it took an equal position. 
            The Dutch had already categorized still life by its subjects and their social and moral implications.  The categories included The Kitchen and Market Still Life, The Banquet Still Life, Flower Painting, The Breakfast Piece, The Still Life of Fruit, The Vanitas and Allegorical Still Life, The Hunt, Attributes of Art, Music, and Science, and Familiar Objects.  While a painting of the lavish opulence of a rich man’s spread would appeal to an audience interested in those signs of wealth, one depicting a frugal table might appeal to a more moralistic taste.
            Historically, still life was regarded by the academies as the inferior branch of artistic endeavor, after landscape, figure painting, and the ultimate pictorial achievement, grand historical painting.  At first, still life was not even included the in French Royal Academy.  Jean Chardin, in the 18th century, chose to treat his still-life subjects as real objects oberservable in daily life, in an attempt to purge still life of its allegorical elements.  He underlines the directness of his interpretations by making his backgrounds and table surfaces white or off-white.  Chardin represents a trend toward prioritizing aesthetic issues, in which the overall effect of a piece, in terms of light, color harmonies, composition, and depth, is more important than either symbolic content or virtuosic brilliance in copying details.
            The most significant subject chosen for still-life painting by the 19th-century Realists was what are known as Familiar Objects.  Eschewing the moralizing allegory, florid Romantic decoration, or the studious learning of the Attributes, artists who chose Familiar subjects were aligning themselves with a philosophy that hailed the common man in preference to the foppish aristocrat, and simultaneously showed a preference for simplified, formally-motivated canvases, in lieu of complex, detailed images, laden with minutiae.
            This brief analysis of some of the historical practitioners of still life reveals what may be regarded as a momentous trend: the relieving of art of its symbolic freight so that formal and pictorial elements may come to the fore.  This would lead ultimately to the planar, geometric experiments of Cézanne and then to Modernism.  Still life that delighted in precious minutiae or simplistic decoration continued to be painted, but that more adventurous tendency in still life is worth remembering when considering the work of Janet Fish.
            Still-life played a formative role in the creation of Cubism, as so many works of Analytic Cubism rely on the still-life format for their starting point.  Cubism, in fact, was the ultimate vindication for still life.  Consistently regarded as the most minor type of painting to be undertaken, here it was central to one of the most important art movements of the 20th century.  Like all the classic genres, still life never really went away.  Modernist painters, such as Amédée Ozenfant, continued to use the still-life as a basis for exploring formal issues.  Hans Hoffman relied on the still life as a way to get into his abstract compositions.  It was simply by reverting to out-and-out representational painting at the time she did that Fish went against the grain.  At the early end of the spectrum, still-life can be seen as a key component leading to modernism and abstraction.  Why not turn that around and have abstraction lead to back to still life?

IV

Beginning in the late 1970s, Janet Fish’s paintings took an abrupt turn.  Instead of being tight close-up looks at monolithic objects, with perhaps a snippet of background, Fish now changes her perspective, and with that the whole world appears to enter.  Instead of looking through things from a low vantage point, she is now looking down at them.  She has pulled back slightly, so the viewer gets the feeling -- more comfortable, less constrained than in earlier work -- of standing before a table, say, looking down at an array of things on it, while the view beyond the usual window is visible at the top.  So the format of table support in the lower portion of the canvas, objects in the middle, and landscape in the upper portion, becomes standard.  As a result of this change, Fish both gains and loses.  She gains a feeling of realism, against the artificiality of earlier work.  At the same time, it was precisely the artificiality, the feeling of being straitjacketed into looking at Windex bottles up close, that excited the viewer.  Giving that up, she must look elsewhere for visual interest.  She has her estimable skill in depicting the difficult surfaces and textures, and she now applies that to a breathtaking assortment of objects.  Her compositions become much more complex, reflecting a desire now to give every section of the canvas a vibrant life.

Maybe it was about activity and movement, but I’m working with things I see, other kinds of color and texture, and I decided to bring other things in.  It was still purely still life, but I was starting to use flowers and things that had color and different kinds of shapes, not necessarily those machine-made shapes.  And then the light had to function differently, instead of shining through things.  I decided I would keep using the light, because it does keep moving, and it does pull things together and break them apart.  So it’s going to be going over things and through things and still stay light...  It seemed to me that composition is about grabbing the viewer’s eye and keeping it there in the painting and trying to keep that eye moving around the painting and not let it escape, so that whoever’s looking at the painting will start to see what’s actually in the painting.  That seemed to be the whole purpose of composition.  To attract the eye and keep it there. 

            Now there was a lot to attract the eye.  Goldfish Fantasy, September (1978, 46 x 54 inches) gives an idea of the new terrain.  Fish’s titles are keys to her thinking, and two facts about this painting are clear: it intends to capture a specific fall light, and it represents the imagination set adrift.  The composition is dominated by the large goldfish bowl, whose overlapping ellipses are expertly evinced, and a gaudy glass flask containing a crimson liquid, presumably wine.  From these focal points, the painting spreads, and the eye may travel left to the branch of blackberries sitting in an ultramarine glass bowl, or it may pick up the wildflowers and hanging red berries, located in an obscured vessel.  It is here that Fish begins to play with the viewer’s expectations.  On approaching a painting such as this, one assumes that, since it appears to be a realist depiction, one should be able to comprehend it easily.  Fish subverts this expectation by leading the eye from areas of stability to areas of indeterminate spatial relation.  Often, as in this painting, this effect is enhanced by the discreet use of a mirror, its edges hidden and its image identified as reflection only after close inspection.  She also attains ambiguity, as here, by including objects (the wildflowers) whose source is partially hidden.  The result is that those parts of the canvas are cut loose from gravity, as it were, and the flowers are left unconnected, giving them the illusion of being in motion. 
            To relieve oneself of the giddiness of flying without a foothold, one returns to the lower portion of the canvas, the solidity of table top, and the objects settled on it.   Looking toward the top right of the canvas, one sees evidence of a rural setting, but it is painted in such a brushy way, perhaps to indicate the effect of bright light on vegetation, that one cannot make out much detail.  The shapes the reflections in water make, and the curves of the bowl, refracted by being seen through water, are familiar territory for Fish.  New for her is the prisiming of the outdoor scene when seen through the bowl, and also the many new textures of flowers, leaves, and fruit.  She is developing new techniques to keep pace with the myriad new items that begin to enter her work.  She is also moving into dazzlingly orchestrated compositions, as the interplay between diagonals and ellipses in this piece shows.
            A feeling of opening up begins to be felt in Fish’s work of the early 1980s.  A painting like Buttercups and Grapes (1981, 38 x 64 inches) pushes a reflective glass table top up until it feels almost parallel to the picture plane.  Here there are only a few items arrayed -- two glass teacups, saucers, a vase with buttercups and columbines, a sugar bowl, and a somewhat dishevelled bunch of grapes.  Again, the curvilinear forms of tableware help form the composition, those on the table echoing the grand arc of the table top, which stretches from  the left to right edge of the canvas like a grand archway.  In this painting too, as it is less filled with individual objects, overall subtleties of color can come to the fore, in this case the range from violet highlighted with pink to bright yellow to manganese blue highlighted with green and yellow.
            Not only her perspective but simultaneously her format is opening.  Fish always had a predilection for extreme horizontals, and in a painting like Spring Party (1981, 55 x 131 inches), a new friezelike effect occurs, to which Fish is often to return in subsequent work.  The extreme angle of the table (or window ledge) is again pushed up to feel almost parallel to the canvas, highly compressing space and abstracting the visual experience, as though the objects before one are floating in space or arrayed on a flat, architectural surface.  As often, the many ellipses of bowls, cups, and bases of drinking glasses interact with strong rectilinears to give this painting its stimulating formal impact.
            1982 was a pivotal year for Fish, as it was the first year she allowed the human figure into her work.  From that point on, it would be impossible to define her simply as a painter of still lifes, although she continues to paint many still lifes, and the world of the close-up object often plays a crucial role in her figure painting.  Like everything else in her work, Fish simply decided the time was right to take this unexpected step in her painting.

I thought, “What’s the problem with putting figures in?”  And I knew the figure did bring in this extra thing, as words had done, you know, words on the labels.  People focus on it and read the words, and people do the same thing with figures.  Like a word, a figure is very powerful as a subject, and I thought I’d see if there was any reason to use the figure.  So I started trying it out, and every now and then I felt there was a reason.  Then I started to put in animals and anything else.  I should be able to use anything, but I have to be able to juggle it all together and think about what I’m doing with it.  When the figure gets into the painting, in some ways it makes it easier.  The figure demands so much attention.  The eye goes right to it, so in some senses that makes the organization of the painting easier.  On the other hand, there’s a complication, because the figure gives out so many messages.  And that’s the gesture as it’s commonly thought of -- the gesture the figure’s making.  But I always thought of gesture also as the gesture of the painting, the movement, which is more like that Abstract Expressionist thing. 

            Barry (1982, 60 by 56 inches) is one of Fish’s first figure paintings.  It is a portrait of the poet and critic Barry Yourgrau, who had written the catalogue essay for Fish’s 1980 exhibition at Robert Miller Gallery.  Most of Fish’s portraits are of friends, so there is immediately a semantic element to these paintings, and increasingly one finds evidence of this in the objects as well.  Just as Dutch still-life painters chose the objects they would depict with great attention to their symbolic connotations, Fish, while always thinking formally and compositionally, also uses subjects that have different levels of meaning.  It can be on the obvious level of a joke, or it can be, like Panofsky’s “disguised symbolism,” a personal concern, that the observer can only learn with great effort.  On the level of formalism, Fish is constantly manipulating the elements in her pictures to attain the visual impact she desires.  Like the Dutch flower painters, who had a store of images they re-used, Fish also has stock items, or she acquires objects for a specific painting.  To an important extent, she contrives the visual information that makes up her pictures. 
            In the portrait of Yourgrau, we see the subject seated at a table covered with a bright pink cloth, a giveaway that we are in a decidedly Fish-controlled setting.  At his left, at the upper right of the painting, a window opens onto a somewhat generalized view of factory buildings and the yellows of a sunset.  Books lie scattered on the window will, which is draped in a green cloth.  Behind Yourgrau, on the wall, a chubby Chinese boy, perhaps a folkloric figure, rides a huge fish out of the picture frame.  This is presumably a poster or painting affixed to the wall, but we are given scant information to tell us its precise material identity.  In front of Yourgrau, on the table, sit a copy of The New York Post, a half-eaten sandwich, a plastic bag of pears, a magazine with young women on the cover, some papers, a curiously shaped Art Deco lamp, and a typewriter.  Ostensibly, this is the lair of a writer looking for inspiration as he stares wistfully out over the table at an indeterminate point to our right.
            This could all be a kind of cinema verité, except that it is mainly designed by Fish.  The typewriter is not Yourgrau’s but one Fish had at her studio.  Likewise, the other items in the picture are more Fish’s doing than Yourgrau’s.  As Fish explains: “I went with the idea that he was a writer, but he didn’t have a lot of choice in there.  I put a magazine in there with some girls on it.  There’s something naughty in his stories, and so I put that in.  He was somebody’s favorite boy I always thought, so I put that Chinese poster behind him.”
            An inexplicit narrative begins to crop up in Fish’s paintings.  Butterfly Collection (1984, 54 x 68 inches) while it is a magnificent formal exercise, also reeks with the ambience of a good Raymond Chandler story.  Here are the exotic specimens of an obsessive collector.  In the distance, cars speed by on rain-soaked, artificially-illuminated streets.  In the foreground, a decanter and a studded glass hold a green liqueur.  Even the oddly striving poppies with their hairy stems seem a narcotic hint of a trip to deviant pursuits in an underworld not far away.  The final tip is the ashtray, with waiting unsmoked cigarette, lying on top of a book on butterflies and moths.  The ashtray shows the Guanabara bay of Rio de Janeiro, its lurid tones of lavender and aqua carefully painted by Fish.  We may never know who is the owner of the butterflies (though we may surmise it is painter Hunt Slonem, whose objects appear in other paintings by Fish).  Yet we undeniably feel the anticipatory thrill the film-noir genre engenders, though our feeling is tempered by the fact that we cannot pin down the narrative detail.  We may also remember the butterfly symbolism from St. Vincent’s border.
            Although Fish’s paintings have a contemporary feel to them -- they can include television, football, and cookouts -- we can assume that she is a careful student of art history as well.  In fact, her attention -- to other people’s paintings as much as to the world of appearances -- is one of her defining qualities.  It is not so much that her work “resolves” a perceived conflict between formal abstraction and perceptual realism as that she uses both these elements and others to arrive at a fresh, highly-controlled, way of seeing the world and presenting it to others in her paintings.
            Shells From Borneo (1985, 60 x 70 inches) immediately brings to mind the great Dutch still lifes of shells and the symbolic overtones they possess.  In Fish’s painting, an astonishing array of forms draws the mind to thoughts of the exotic climes whence they came.  That Fish lavishes so much detail on the boxes these shells have ostensibly just arrived in, still packed with paper, and captures beautifully the textures of a cardboard box with the “3M” logo on it, makes the image a decidedly contemporary one.  The color ploy of bright red, purple, pink transparent, and green fabrics on a light blue background make a typically Fishian formal pattern, echoed by the three descending boxes on the right side of the picture.  The eye is led on a circuitous route, echoing the curvilinear shapes of which Fish is so fond, here evinced in the diverse shapes of the shells.  As a final compositional detail, which may be an inside joke, one of the containers for some tiny shells is a matchbox, emblazoned with a circular pattern in red and green.  This is perhaps a reference to the way in which art -- any art, but here it is Modern art -- can end up in commercial design.
            As the ‘80s progressed, Fish moved further and further from her stark initial images.  She did more paintings of friends, and she allowed more of the landscape into her paintings, particularly the landscape of rural Vermont in summer, where she purchased a barn to use as a studio in 1979.  Being in Vermont allowed Fish to spend time with her uncle, the sculptor Clark Voorhees, who had influenced her to become an artist.  The two would travel to auctions and lawn sales, enjoying a shared passion for objects.  Rural events like lawn sales and picnics began to appear in Fish’s paintings.  She also began to use photographs to gather information, particularly of people, that she would later synthesize into a composition.  This is another example of planned artificiality that subtly  changed the tenor of her work, as elements of a photographed light began to intercede, sometimes in conjunction with directly perceived light in the same canvas.

I usually need to know the people to put them in a painting, or I need to have a reason for wanting them there.  Now I take a lot of snapshots all the time, and I rummage around when I’m thinking... I did a painting of a lawn sale last summer.  It seemed like it would be fun to do it, as a painting.  These friends were having one, all these different families getting together, so I went there and hung out and took a lot of snapshots, and then I put it together differently.  I took elements from different photographs, which I combined with an arrangement of my own objects.  I took a pile of stuff I felt like painting, and as I worked, I changed things.  I put in a towel rack, because all of a sudden the shapes from the towel rack were right.

            We know of Fish’s consummate craft in conveying texture and detail.  We know of her achievement in combining complex formal and compositional structures with observed objects, be they exotic or mundane.  There is more to her work than even those considerable accomplishments.  There is a lust for life, evinced in her sometimes hyper-excited sense of fantasy, and a light sense of humor.  A painting like Patzcurao (1989, 42 x 92 inches) is an example of the former tendency, the ultimate in exotica with its tropical fruit, kitsch-baroque tea service and “red native women” fruit stand.  The chroma in the colors seems too high to be believed, and the effect of the piece is like taking a powerful drug.  We are mesmerized by the intensity of the colors and the allure of the design, but it is the background that really hooks us.  A view of tropical aqua waters and distant island mountaintops provides the setting for a languorous daydream.
            Fish’s sense of humor is evidenced in a painting like Things That Go Bump In The Night (1990, 70 x 42 inches), in which two [type of] monkeys overturn a vase of pink and yellow poppies onto a tabletop display of fruit illuminated by the same space-age-looking lamp from the Barry Yourgrau portrait. 

Hunt Slonem has lots of pets.  He said I couldn’t paint his toucans, but he didn’t seem to feel so strongly about the monkeys.  So I went over there, and I took a lot of snapshots of his monkeys.  The photographs were like sketches.  I had a lot, and I combined them.  The monkeys were never there with those things, ever.  Actually, they didn’t even necessarily have the same poses, but with all those photographs, I began to see how their legs worked and how they did things.  The pieces of furniture are mine.  I set up a still life and then I put the monkeys in it.  It was for fun, and because they were living things, and they create disorder.  They smash things up.  There’s a genre with monkeys and still life, and they are always breaking it up, the way the cat did in the painting I have the cat in.  The cat creates disorder too.  I like that idea, emotionally.  What I was trying to do with still life itself was to break it up and not have just objects.  I’m not interested in still life as objects.  It’s more as a situation.

V

            As time goes on, Fish poses herself ever more daunting technical challenges, and she paints with evident mastery.  A painting like Toy Swans (1994, 56 x 50 inches), with its irregular sprouts and twists of colored blown glass, represents a supreme challenge for the painter.  Surprisingly perhaps, Fish relies more on smaller strokes in the later paintings, as though painting at a faster rate, giving her late light a shimmer that the stolidity of the objects in early paintings flatly refused.  Although her paintings show no strain and evoke a life of pleasurable settings, a painting’s genesis is not always easy for Fish.  In earlier paintings, she would follow through with her initial set-up, as a lesson in discipline.  Later, she allowed the relation of objects to evolve during the painting process.
            For her most complicated compositions, she uses a water-soluble pencil to work out relationships.  She also uses a proportional scale and a ruler but has found those tools can be too rigid, since the addition of color changes objects’ apparent size.   Sometimes, after adding color, she still needs to change the positions and relative sizes of objects, and sometimes she finds she must jettison an object or replace it.

I keep what’s happening in the still life pretty open and fluid, and it just keeps changing.  There was a whole period of time when, once I set the thing up, that’s what I painted.  Now, I’m in a different place.  I don’t do studies.  The size of the canvas makes the requirements.  If I were to do something on paper, it seems to me that that material requires something different.  When I was making pastels, the texture of the pastel and the size of the paper determined what happened there, and that didn’t translate for me into a painting. 

Interestingly, even though Fish’s early art was based on escaping the influence of Abstract Expressionism at a point when it had become a set of rules for making a painting, now she finds herself touched by that style’s far-reaching influence.

I owe a lot to the Abstract Expressionism.  Basically, a lot of what I do is still coming out of that, to the point that I’m very aware of movement within the painting, from one thing to another.  I’m not trying to paint one object and then another object.  For me, when my paintings are the least interesting or not working is when the objects are taking too much precedence.  A lot of times, I take a color, and I just happen to have it, and I’m moving around in the painting finding it in different places, and then I start to focus on one place and start to follow movements.  I still try to stay very much with the experience that made me interested in it -- the sensation and experience -- to stay with that and not to lose it. 

            Fish’s figure paintings can have a placid quality, perhaps the result of their gestures coming from photographs.  Her considerateness prevents her violating her subjects’ goodwill by painterly distortion or long hours of posing.  Objects she can move around at will, and they will wait for weeks, if necessary, for the proper alignment of form and color to coalesce.  When we know a little about how Fish arrives at a finished painting, the steps she must go through, we begin to see the complexity in these apparently effortless vignettes. 
            Still Life With Parrot (1993, 52 x 52 inches) is an example of the fury of Fish’s brushstroke.  Even if this painting may have been made over a period of days or weeks, the multiplicity of strokes, beginning with the tapestry at the bottom and reaching a crescendo in the hanging tapestry at the top, which almost erupts into abstraction, gives this painting a feeling of tumultuous energy.   There is a certain blindingness to many of Fish’s images, a light that is almost too bright too look at.  This is one of her salient achievements, and it is an odd one, as is the actual point of view of many of her works. 
            Dog Days (1993, 46 x 80 inches) takes a familiar stance for Fish, in that the majority of the canvas is taken up by a view of a sunlit table with lemonade and watermelon at the ready.  In the background, four dogs play or rest in patches of shade.  At the top edge of the canvas, the tan ground reaches a pale blue edge, apparently a body of water.  If these dogs are playing on the beach, though, then where is the shade coming from?  If it is in fact dirt, and not sand, then how to explain the bluish band in the distance?  These conundrums, frequent in Fish’s paintings, point up the solidity of the things in the foreground.  In this case, an angular blue vase towers in the center of the canvas, bringing to mind Fish’s early paeans to bottled liquor, while a black Labrador at the right is dwarfed by the vase and slices of watermelon.  Many of the paintings with figures follow a similar strategy -- the figures provide a backdrop to an elaborate foreground still life.  This is an apparent reversal of how most artists tend to use the figure and an effort by Fish to draw the eye away from that which naturally attracts the most attention.  There is a certain wit involved, as though Fish were saying, “What really interests me in this scene is not you all, but this table full of funny objects.”
            Three recent paintings take up the motif of seashells again, and it is informative to see how Fish varies the tenor in each case.  Ocean (1997, 48 x 60 inches) shows crabs, oysters and red snapper laid out on newspaper as though recently purchased in preparation for a seaside cookout.  Iron Tea Kettle (1997, 50 x 50 inches), by contrast, combines some exotic-looking shells with objects and plants of an Asian feel, on a windowsill overlooking a glimpse of a street scene like that in Butterfly Collection.  Sea Breezes (1999, 42 x 92 inches) shows Fish at her most fantastic, and the glassware, elaborate shells and coral in front of a snatch of beach, add up to one of those paintings that exist simply to array marvelous objects in shallow space. 
            There is a shifting, from painting to painting, of the amount of setting provided, and hence the degree to which the viewer feels secure in placing himself at the scene of a given image.  Just as Fish often sets her objects within spatial ambiguity, or more precisely has them lead the eye from relative solidity to relative ambiguity and back again, so her settings entice us with just that amount they choose to reveal.  Because of the hints of setting Fish provides, one finds oneself asking “What is the precise realistic situation this painting is meant to describe?”  The paintings alternate between seeming capricious displays of technique and formal invention and odd perspectives that often do not give much information as to their context.  Combined with these tantalizing qualities, there is the wit in a painting like Dog Days, such that one finally can picture oneself sitting at this table about to avail oneself of a much-desired glass of lemonade.

            In 1979, Fish met the painter Charles Parness, and the two have been together ever since.  Parness is known for his comic multiple self-portraits, and it may be he encourages Fish to include more humor in her work.  “Sometimes it’s so hard to know,” she says.  “Did you choose to be with somebody because you share certain things, or maybe you incite each other further?  I think his paintings became more and more humorous during the time I’ve known him, and you do have a conversation after a while, even if the paintings are different.”
            Certainly, Fish’s work has never tended to the somber, the tendentious, or the moralistic.  If she has escaped those possible traps of still-life painting, still she injects much of her personal vision into her work.  In the 1990s and beyond, her paintings have become ever more dazzling, gossamer tours de force of glass, light, and shadow, and there is an unexpected tenderness to her depictions of children.  She has frequently chosen subjects considered to be off-limits, boldly flouting received opinion.  Her paintings of things can be seen as pure delight, beautiful objects that convey no message, that cause the mind to stop thinking and to contemplate the marvel before one’s eyes.  That contemplation can go on for many years.