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 unspecified subjects—leaves of a tree seen through a window, a section of floor tiles, an old-fashioned fashioned spacious fixture— she makes, as one critic says, "quiet, abstract manifestations of observed realities." She is a studio artiste who paints not what she sees in an instant but rather what she observes continuously, day after day. The result, she says, is not in view of that much temporal as durational. Her paintings compress many instances of observation for that reason as to become, as she sees it, "a parallel system to a lived experience." The paintings dearth spatial orientation and, as a critic says, can "be described as both highly realizable and abstract without compromising either term." In 2008, Alan G. Artner, writing in the Chicago Tribune, said "This is put on an act of little refinements and adjustments. The world of unknown things generates it, but Fish's qualities of seeing and adjoin elevate the things to a plane upon which they leave behind their humble character."