Janet Fish, Painter Who Focused on Light in Glass Still Lifes, Dies at 87

Janet Fish, a painter who transformed everyday still lifes into studies of light, 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 more than a decade ago.

Ms. Fish arrived on the New York art scene in the early 1960s and refused to follow prevailing trends such as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and Pop Art. Working in a Lower East Side studio, she painted fruits, vegetables, plastic-wrapped food, jars and bottles directly in changing sunlight; "The reason for painting glass was to totally focus on light, and the glass held the light," she said.

Her first important show came in 1971 at the Kornblee Gallery, where critics praised her rendering of transparencies; Hilton Kramer wrote that she was "in love with transparencies" and had "a marvelous gift for rendering them with a cool but painterly precision." Her work entered the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney and the National Gallery of Art, and some pieces have sold for more than $200,000.

Born May 18, 1938, in Boston, Ms. Fish spent part of her youth in Bermuda, received a bachelor’s degree from Smith College in 1960 and earned degrees in painting from Yale. Her marriages to Rackstraw Downes and Edward Levin ended in divorce; she met Mr. Parness in 1979 and married him in 2006.

Key Topics

Culture, Janet Fish, Wells, Vt, Charles Parness, Kornblee Gallery, Yale University