Julia Fish
She later praised the high quality of that school's teachers, the intensity of its classes, and a prevailing atmosphere which encouraged close interaction among its students.
She has said that, in part, she felt an emotional connection with to the landscape paintings of John Frederick Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade, and Albert Pinkham Ryder.
[7] That year she also participated in a faculty exhibition at the University of Iowa Museum of Art and in the late 1970s and early 1980s her work appeared in group shows at Mount Hood Community College (in 1978 with Esther Podemski); the Hallie Ford Museum of Art; Willamette University ("Oregon Women Artists" 1979); Linfield College, McMinnville, Oregon ("Current Concerns" 1983); and the Meyerhoff Gallery in the Maryland Institute College of Art ("Ten Years, Mount Royal School of Painting" 1985).
[7][note 2] In 1986, she participated in a dual exhibition at Feature, Inc. along with her husband and in two other group shows, one at the Hyde Park Art Center and the other at the Robbin Lockett Gallery.
[note 3] At the time of her 1988 appearance at this gallery, a critic said Fish was one of the fortunate few among Chicago artists who was able to sell all that she exhibited and had a waiting list of collectors willing to buy.
[7] In the early 1990s Fish began making small paintings of objects in her immediate environment generally showing a section rather than the entire unit.
These subjects included part of a brick wall, the winter sky seen through a window, hexagonal tiles on a bathroom floor, and tar paper siding on a neighboring building.
On a trip to Vienna, however, she gave close examination to the exterior of the Portois-Fix Palace designed by the architect, Max Fabiani and discovered in its facade a constantly shifting visual experience.
The exhibition's thirty-five paintings and drawings documented her transition from atmospheric subjects—such as rain or sky—and natural objects—such as leaves or rocks—to closely observed elements within and near to the prosaic urban building where she lived.
[5] She usually retained the color of the subject, rendering it in subdued hues and subtly enhancing it in multiple thin layers of paint.
[21] In addition to the Renaissance Society retrospective Fish contributed works to group and solo exhibitions at a large number museums and private galleries during the 1990s.
[22] The visual elements she put on her canvases were meant to convey physical objects but also her own motion through the spaces they represented and the light that came from fixtures in the rooms and through the windows.
[2] The result could be seen, as one reviewer said, "as a thoughtful meditation on the nature of occupancy within a domestic environment, exactingly rendered in multiple paint layers.
She made all the paintings at the same time, keeping them in view on the walls of her studio as her ideas evolved during the period of their creation.
[3] Each is one seventh the size of the room it represents and all are abstracted dramatically by elimination of elements in the plans from which she worked and by inclusion of shapes that denote motion and light.
[7] In 2010 the Illinois State University College of Fine Arts gave Fish a retrospective exhibition of studies and drawings from 1996 onward.
[8] In 2015, a reviewer said of her recent work, "It is this quality of scrutiny — of looking with such focused intensity that the commonplace things in the world become mysterious — that I find compelling.
