Julia Fish

Julia Fish (born 1950) is an American artist whose paintings have a deceptive simplicity.

She paints in oil on stretched rectangular canvases of varying size.

By means of close observation of everyday subjects—leaves of a tree seen through a window, a section of floor tiles, an old fashioned light fixture— she makes, as one critic says, "quiet, abstract manifestations of observed realities."

She is a studio artist who paints not what she sees in an instant but rather what she observes continuously, day after day.

The result, she says, is not so much temporal as durational.

Her paintings compress many instances of observation so as to become, as she sees it, "a parallel system to a lived experience."

The paintings lack spatial orientation and, as a critic says, can "be described as both highly realistic and abstract without compromising either term."

In 1950, Fish was born on the Oregon coast in the small community of Toledo.

She has said that her parents, who refused to have a television in their house, guided her to develop an early interest in reading, drawing, and music.

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).

Like her, he was a graduate of PNCA (B.F.A. 1974) and MICA (M.F.A. 1982).

That year she showed in commercial galleries for the first time: an invitational show at a gallery called Feature, Inc. concurrent with a group exhibition at the Rhona Hoffman Gallery, both in Chicago.

She attended the Museum Art School of the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon, and there obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1976.

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.

After graduating from PNCA she crossed the continent to attend the Mount Royal School of Art within the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, obtaining a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1982.

Between 1982 and 1985, Fish was a visiting artist and assistant professor of painting and drawing at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.

During her student years she had made large, abstract paintings.

After the move to Iowa, her work became smaller and less abstract.

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.

In 1984, Fish was given a solo exhibition called "Drawings 1976 -1984" at Lane Community College in Eugene, Oregon.

In 1985, Fish moved to Chicago.

At that time or sometime during the previous few years she married the sculptor, Richard Rezac.

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.

The name of the last of these shows, "Abstracted Landscapes," indicates the nature of her paintings at this time.

A critic called them "reticent pieces," free of bombast, that were "romantic, hazy, and soft-edged in form" and said they were not so much landscapes as the memoir of landscapes.

Fish's work appeared again at the Robbin Lockett Gallery in one solo (1987) and two group shows (1988 and 1991).

In 1987, Fish participated in the inaugural exhibition of José Freire's Fiction/Nonfiction Gallery in Manhattan's East Village, her first appearance in a New York gallery.

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.

The wait might be a long one since Fish worked slowly.

Since that early appearance Fish has frequently exhibited in Manhattan galleries including the Loughelton Gallery (solo, 1988 and 1989), the Amy Lipton Gallery (solo 1992), the Lipton-Owens Company (solo, 1995), Feigen Contemporary (group 1998, solo 1999), the Hollis Taggart Galleries (group 2015), and the David Nolan Gallery (solo 2015, group 2016).

In 1988, Fish described the slow process by which most of her work evolved.

She said, "It's very unusual that I'll see something, go to the studio, draw it and paint it. That rarely happens. I'll see it and it will stay in my head for a while, and maybe later I'll try to figure out through drawing what I saw. But sometimes it's a delay of two months, or four or six. That's part of the distilling, getting a sense of what's literal there, what's tangible and intangible, what's abstract and some other kind of order."

In 1989, Fish contributed a painting called "Rock" in her first museum exhibition in Chicago.

Held by the Renaissance Society, the show paired one piece from each of twenty-three artists with one of the Date paintings by the Japanese artist On Kawara.

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.

A reviewer said, "There is something comforting, and charismatically fascinating in staring at these familiar patterns."

Of this new work she said, "I encounter the subjects continually so they become extremely familiar, though I don't work from observation. I don't place the canvas next to the window and paint what's outside. I don't look at the subject and paint at the same time. So there's memory and recollection in the work, but time is telescoped."

She participated in other Renaissance Society group shows in 1994 and 1996, and was given a solo exhibition in 2015 (discussed below).

In 2008, Alan G. Artner, writing in the Chicago Tribune, said "This is work of small refinements and adjustments. The world of everyday things generates it, but Fish's qualities of seeing and touch elevate the things to a plane on which they leave behind their humble character."