Janet Fish (b. 1938) is an American painter known for her lifelong exploration of light and color, working primarily in oil, pastel, and watercolor. She earned her MFA from Yale in 1963 alongside peers like Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, and Richard Serra, and though she was trained in Abstract Expressionism, she found her footing as a representational painter after being encouraged by Alex Katz to paint from observation. Beginning in the late 1960s she focused on everyday transparent objects — glasses, cellophane-wrapped fruit, liquid-filled containers — using them not as subjects in themselves but as vehicles for studying tone, color, and above all light; she later expanded to tablescapes of domestic objects, outdoor scenes, and figures, but her core concern never changed. As she put it: “I don’t paint the objects, I paint one after the other. I paint through the painting.”
Read an interview with Janet Fish on the Art Student’s League of New York website.