During that period, art schools tended to favor the teaching of Abstract Expressionism, and at first Fish followed along, painting in that style. She soon abandoned it, noting that "Abstract Expressionism didn't mean anything to me. It was a set of rules. After graduating, Fish spent a year in Philadelphia, then she took up residence in SoHo, where she and Louise Nevelson became friends.
Fish largely rejected the Abstract Expressionism endorsed by her Yale instructors, feeling "totally disconnected" from it and desiring instead the "physical presence of objects"; but some of its very general principles, such as the boldness and smooth, flowing brushstrokes, may have influenced her figurative work.
Her work, although Realist, may include abstract forms. The exhibit included detailed paintings of vegetables and fruits. Her first New York exhibition followed two years after. Fish is known for her large, bold Realist still lifes, especially the way she paints everyday items such as clear glassware partially filled with water, concentrating on the shapes of the objects and the play of light off of their surfaces. She is interested in painting light and a concept she has on occasion called "packaging.
She created still life paintings of grocery store products packaged in cellophane. She said that the "plastic wrap catches the light and creates fascinating reflections". Among her other favorite subjects are everyday objects, especially various kinds of clear glassware, either empty or partially filled with liquids such as water, liquor, or vinegar. Examples range from glasses, bottles, goblets, and jars to a fishbowl filled with water and a goldfish.
Other subjects include teacups, flower bouquets, textiles with interesting patterns, goldfish, vegetables, and mirrored surfaces. Even though she was painting still lifes, she sometimes included human figures, such as a girl performing cartwheels or a boy with his dog splashing in the water. Pretty objects are given the same importance in the images as common objects - a beautiful obsidian vase and some red cellophane. This reflects the artistic tradition of including objects from "high" and "low" culture.
She says she welcomes beauty when it shows up. Fruit, flowers and glassware offer the viewer a sumptuous visual feast in every image, though sometimes her works are of unglamorous subjects, such as scaffolding on a building and a stack of plates. Her subjects really are color, light, visual movement and space, and the content of her work is perhaps life itself, seen in isolated moments of unusual juxtapositions and casual glances. It is the work of a true painter, who sees potential paintings many times throughout the average day.
Her use of color is extraordinary - probably resulting from her color studies with Albers, and its high key perhaps comes from her Bermuda childhood. In many of her paintings, there are few areas of "neutral" colors - rather there are only intense, rich colors that nevertheless live together in harmony.
I read where she said that still life offers a painter the most visually innovative possibilities, and as a painter of still life, I agree with her.
You can literally create your own world, even a world filled with combinations impossible in "real" life. You can put a far-off galaxy of stars, for example, next to a glass of lemonade. And this implies juxtapositions - poetic, Pop, metaphysical, and more. It also offers an opportunity to use the pure colors in your paint box - the bright reds, magentas, yellows and ultramarines.
Those colors in a landscape would create a Fauvist image - and that has already been done! In a portrait, they would become garish. But in a still life, they can fit perfectly. The possibilities of composition in still life are endless, and forever interesting.
In particular, Fish sometimes uses the vertical format for her still lifes, which I also use. I was influenced in this by the interiors of Bonnard and by Persian miniature paintings.
This is a more contemporary version of the still life, which in past centuries was commonly in the horizontal format. The foreground and background positive and negative spaces in her work are often shifting in space and importance, an attribute common to painting since the middle 19th century. This results in unusual scale and spatial effects, such as in the painting Dog Days , where a dog in the yard appears smaller than the pieces of watermelon on the table; it also offers a whimsical juxtaposition of unexpected and unnoticed casual life experiences.
As a painter, I know how much fun it is to include these bon mots in "serious" art - these representations of contemporary life in our consumer culture - they are poignant, trivial and ubiquitous. We paint what we see around us, regardless of high or low cultural value. Fish's use of transparent objects, such as glass and cellophane, also provide a contemporary sense of atmospheric spatial depth, without the traditional use of chiaroscuro light and shade to depict volumes in space. This combining of foreground and background also produces images which are both still life and landscape, in such works as Dog Days and Geese in Flight.
In the latter image, wild geese in flight dominate the top half of the painting, over an object-laden table. For me, this juxtaposition of wildlife and manmade nature is somehow poetic - and the movement of space forward and backward in the image adds to this simultaneity - it reverses the normal hierarchy of our experience.
Here, in the painter's world, everything is equal, and everything is capable of creating in us the impulse to paint it. As poets arrange words to elicit contrasts, painters combine images to evoke meanings or atmospheres, often unexpected, that may have actually been seen in a Kodak moment outdoors.
She has said that we see what we are looking for. Geese in Flight is 60" x 60" - not a small painting; many of Fish's paintings are large, which is a different experience when viewed in person than a small still life, and has more of a "degree of difficulty" to paint. As a painter of the stuff of our everyday lives, I can relate to the joy of painting humble and even tacky objects, that "do not belong" in "serious" art.
Fish paints potato chips, cupcakes with "jimmies" on them, as artists have presented us with the humblest subjects for centuries, perhaps to try to get us to pay attention to what is around us. Please note: All biographies will be fully viewable on Fridays, but the rest of the week biographies are available only to subscribers. Biography Guidelines When submitting biographical information, we appreciate your consideration of the following: Please keep in mind that askART is not a promotional site, and accordingly biographical information should not be worded for purposes of 'advertising' an artist.
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She paints a section of a still life when the light there is interesting and exciting to her. In this way, her drawings and paintings are a blend of different moments. The flow of light is not the only element creating a sense of movement in Sasha with a Bowl of Candy.
The slanted line of the pencil in the foreground leads the eye up and in from the bottom. Shadows on the right side of the face and candy bowl point toward the center. Fish creates connections between objects by echoing their shapes. Color also ties the objects in Sasha with a Bowl of Candy together. In each work of art, Fish chooses a limited number of colors to work with.
She blends and combines these colors to provide cohesion. The pinks in the candy are subtly reflected in the face. The gray of the background on the right repeats in the glass bowl. This color repetition links foreground, middle ground, and background.
When speaking of her use of color, Fish says she owes a lot to Abstract Expressionism. Where Fish uses light, composition, shape, and color to establish relationships among the elements of the composition, she uses a variety of marks to make each object distinct. This is very important. Light, movement, color, shape, and line—Fish uses these elements in Sasha with a Bowl of Candy to describe a particular person in a specific place and time.
I look for a complex interaction of color, and that is what I find. So I paint that.
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