Janet Fish, Painter of Luminous Still Lifes, Dies at 87

Janet Fish, a painter who wielded the humble still life as a rebellion against Abstract Expressionism, transforming jars of pickles, bottles of vodka and bowls of fruit into vessels of dazzling light and unassuming beauty, died on Dec. 11 at her home in Wells, Vt. She was 87.

Her husband, the self-portraitist Charles Parness, said the cause was a recurrence of the brain hemorrhage that had forced her to stop painting in 2012.

Stubborn, and unmoved by what was fashionable, Ms. Fish arrived on the New York City art scene in the early 1960s after studying painting at Yale University, where she was ostracized for refusing to be artistically seduced by masters of abstraction like Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.

“I wanted to be a good artist,” she said. “But I wanted to define what that meant.”

As Abstract Expressionism was petering out that decade, many New York artists turned to Minimalism and Pop Art. Ms. Fish didn’t follow them. At her studio on the Lower East Side, she set fruits and vegetables on a table near a window, painting them as the sunlight brightened and dimmed.

“It keeps me awake, and the light changes the forms and brings in new ideas,” she said in a 2009 interview with the Art Students League of New York. “Sometimes there is a moment when the light does something in one place that is really exciting. I put it in.”

Eventually she shifted to plastic-wrapped food and bottles of various liquids — Windex, vinegar, salad dressing, jelly, honey, liquor.

“I began to perceive that my real interest was light,” Ms. Fish said during an interview with the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in 1988. “The reason for painting glass was to totally focus on light, and the glass held the light.”

Unlike other still life artists, Ms. Fish didn’t take photos of things that she would later reproduce on canvas. She painted the objects themselves for days and sometimes months, letting the changing light slowly affect her perception of them.

“Still life always seemed, to me, the wrong word,” she said, “because it’s not dead.”

She had her first important show in 1971 at the Kornblee Gallery on the Upper East Side. Critics were captivated.

“Ms. Fish is in love with transparencies, with the kind of solid objects that consist of little or nothing but light, and she has a marvelous gift for rendering them with a cool but painterly precision,” Hilton Kramer wrote in a review in The New York Times. “Hers is indeed an impressive talent.”

Her richly colored work grew in complexity. She continued painting glasses and bottles, but in the late 1970s began placing them on top of mirrors, in front of landscapes and cityscapes, and next to flowers, plants, broken eggs, stacks of plates and, in at least one instance, a bowl with a goldfish swimming alone on a sunny afternoon.

Ms. Fish’s paintings were eventually acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art and other major collections around the world. Some of her works have sold for more than $200,000.

“She confers an unprecedented dignity upon the grouped jelly jars or wine bottles that she renders with such deference,” the art historian Linda Nochlin wrote in “Women, Art and Power” (1988). “The glassy fruit- or liquid-filled volumes confront us with the hypnotic solemnity of the processional mosaics at Ravenna, and a similar, faceted, surface sparkle.”

Janet Isobel Fish was born on May 18, 1938, in Boston. Her father, Peter Fish, was an art historian; her mother, Florence (Whistler) Fish, was a sculptor and the daughter of the Impressionist painter Clark Voorhees.

When Janet was 10, the family moved to Bermuda, where her mother had grown up and where “there are always bright colors around you — seas and flowers and skies, in tropical hues,” Ms. Fish said.

To her, the light and colors of the island were infused with energy, and energy, she said, “is always moving through us.”

She considered no other career. “It was never in my head that I wasn’t going to be an artist,” she said.

After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Smith College in 1960, Ms. Fish studied painting at Yale, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts alongside fellow students like the photorealist painter Chuck Close, the sculptor Richard Serra and the post-Minimalist artist Nancy Graves.

“I tried to paint like de Kooning, and I admired his works very much,” she said in the Smithsonian interview. “I was trying to paint these abstract paintings, and I was feeling totally lost.”

One of her instructors, the painter Alex Katz, told her, “Go out and paint the landscape and forget it all.”

So she went to a cemetery and painted. Then she turned to flowers.

“I was trying to define painting for myself by painting what I saw,” Ms. Fish said. “I was trying to understand what color could do.”

Some at the school were baffled. “Then I just stopped listening to everybody, and everybody stopped talking to me,” she said. “I was getting very little feedback.”

In the eyes of just about everyone at Yale, Ms. Fish later recalled, she was just “this girl who’s painting flowers.” Upon arriving in New York in 1965, she continued to follow her own path.

“I just stuck to my work,” she said. “And one thing led to another.”

Ms. Fish’s marriages to Rackstraw Downes and Edward Levin ended in divorce. She met Mr. Parness in 1979; they married in 2006.

In addition to her husband, Ms. Fish is survived by a sister, Alida Fish, and a brother, Winthrop Fish.

When she was getting started, Ms. Fish never painted live models. For one thing, they often showed up late. But more than that, she enjoyed the serenity of working on still lifes.

“There’s something about painting a still life, a kind of contemplation that is not present when you’re painting a figure,” she said in an interview with the artist and critic Don Gray in 1971. “I think you go off into a kind of a reverie when you’re painting a still life. You’re thrown completely away from everything else into this world.”

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