Julia Fish is one of those increasingly rare painters who not only create remarkable work but also speak about it so clearly that, more remarkable, they become their own best commentators.
Not that the Chicago artist would acknowledge this. She is far too self-effacing. But in her deliberative, soft-spoken way, Fish succeeds in giving her art precise verbal translation–which is not at all easy with work so subtle.
Fish’s descriptive talent is especially helpful on the occasion of her first exhibition in an American museum, as the paintings and drawings shown by the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago look so familiar and satisfying that they deceive us into thinking we know their way when, in fact, everyone could benefit from direction.
Of the 35 works on view, most have subjects related to landscape instead of still life or the human figure. But Fish’s presentation of the subjects is neither transcription nor abstraction; it’s something elusive that actively exists between the two.
“All my work is based on something I’ve seen,” Fish says, “and I think I’m less interested now in abstracting from it than in recasting the same information in a way so it has all the properties of the subject but also incorporates my understanding of abstraction.
“I try not to invent things. I try to look. I want the subject to be readable. I don’t run from it. I want to engage the subject to the highest degree possible. My effort is to see it clearer and clearer.”
Drawing played a significant role in that development. The Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Ore., which Fish attended in the early ’70s, required undergraduates to draw from the figure for all four years. So the artist’s early paintings were based on figurative form and direct observation.
Students took their work in personal directions beginning the third year. Fish continued using the figure, but gradually abstracted it, producing ambiguous shapes that offered multiple readings. She says her art then lay “somewhere between Romanesque mural painting and Henri Matisse.”
From Oregon, her place of birth, Fish went to Maryland for graduate school and ended up in Iowa, teaching. During that time–1980 to 1985–her paintings were completely abstract, on up to 4-by-8-foot canvases.
Then something crucial happened.
“In Iowa, I was living in the middle of the country,” Fish says, “in a landscape like Illinois with a seasonal flux. The climate in western Oregon is temperate and continuous throughout the year. So, in the Midwest, the pronounced shift of seasons felt radical; it translated into forms that had emotional resonance and a size for my canvases that gradually got smaller.
“I also paid attention to 19th Century American landscape painting, a part of history I knew about but hadn’t been attentive to. I saw in those works, particularly by John Kensett, Martin Johnson Heade and (Albert Pinkham) Ryder, an overall abstract design yet also a naturalism that frequently had strong feeling. They confirmed for me a lot of ways of thinking.”
Fish came to Chicago in 1985. She assumes that the landscape in which she grew up–Newport, a small lumber and fishing town on the Oregon coast–forever conditioned how she sees, but avers that childhood memories did not determine any of the images in the exhibition.
Her works from the last decade all originated in phenomena encountered in Chicago: first on the walks between her early homes and studios, and more recently in her immediate living environment.
“Now everything is fundamentally here,” Fish says. “It is what I see day after day. If we think about how we hold images in our mind’s eye, we are talking about memory but in a collapsed time frame.
“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.”
The size of Fish’s paintings–“(Small) Birch,” from 1988, is only 17 by 16 inches–would seem to suggest intimacy, though they do not feel intimate to the artist. Newer paintings, especially, seem larger to her than their dimensions, though she is not absolutely sure why. Perhaps it’s because now the images are the exact size of their subjects, and the concentration required to make them so registers visually as heightened intensity.
Her painted surface is, in general, extremely refined and rich in layering; more than one viewer has–like Tiny Tim with the Christmas goose–yearned to stroke it. The quality may well be carried over in part from the artist’s considerable experience making ceramics.
“I think (tactility) has a lot to do with how I see,” Fish says, “and touching is part of that. So even though I don’t usually have my hand on the painting, the brush is an intermediary and the process of painting becomes optical-tactile.
“The siding I live with on (my) house has, for example, a most remarkable surface. It’s grainy from sand pressed into a softened tar base. It’s in a pattern. The colors are probably keyed from the ’40s and ’50s. And the result emulates artificial stone. It’s interesting to try to capture all of that in a painting.
“It gets very interesting when a work that begins as a painting of a specific subject quickly rises up and refers to some other thing, like Jackson Pollock’s drips or Russian Constructivist paintings. It’s edgy to be suddenly in the territory of more than one art historical reference and to have to juggle them through the process of one’s own painting. But I always come back to the original source. I’m interested in art historical references being legible, but I don’t want them to be the leading experience.”
Often Fish has been moved by work that seemed to coincide with what she was thinking about or learning. Inevitably, enough of the work seeped into her own so she later could return to a painting such as “Bricks With Sky” and acknowledge that she had in mind Rene Magritte. But in no instance were any of the pictures conscious homages.
While Fish once painted “pure” abstractions, and some of her recent pieces–particularly from the brush-and-ink series of “Garden” drawings–have seemed to move in that direction, she is convinced that abstract work is, for her, a closed issue. What she has to say in her art has to do with seeing clearly in the world of things. And the way her paintings develop helps her, in turn, to see more things, ever more clearly.
“Color was, for me, a wonderful problem,” says Fish. “One of the most difficult questions early on, in the ’70s and early ’80s, was: If one were inventing a form, how did one assign a color? It was impossible for me to answer it satisfactorily. The act too frequently seemed capricious.
“The color of all the (mature) work is the color of the subject. There are only a couple of pieces in which the value of the color has been significantly altered. Almost all the work in the show has what one might call local color.”
As Fish’s color tends toward the subdued, so is her sense of illumination. “Lumine” treats the orange-yellow artificial light of a street lamp. “Elm” evokes hot foliage lighting up the fall. Otherwise, the atmosphere is sober, contemplative. She always starts painting with lots of light reflected from a light ground, but her finished paintings seldom have the effect because of their many layers of pigment.
Fish, who also teaches in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago, works slowly, on one canvas at a time, each requiring from six weeks to two months. She has the subject of each piece firmly in mind when she begins. It dictates the proportions of the work and the scale. Everything else usually develops in the act of painting. As she says: “The subject is known (beforehand), but what I know about the subject is not.”
The exhibition includes drawings that demonstrate every important way in which the artist uses them. Some are preparatory for paintings. Others were done after paintings. Still others are independent of paintings. Fish considers herself erratic when it comes to them.
Poetry and music are important to her work, though not in any obvious way. Where some artists gravitate toward poets who treat similar subject matter, for example, Fish goes to the poetry of Charles Wright and Jorie Graham for their respective tones of voice and how they are able to accommodate subsidiary ideas.
In like manner she approaches music. Scores for chamber ensembles have greater bearing on her painting than symphonies or concertos, and she particularly cherishes Franz Schubert’s lieder.
“In Schubert’s songs you have the poem and the music composed to underline the mood of the writing,” Fish says. “The music on its own is not so interesting; its importance is more in how it supports the words. It may be a stretch, but that relationship is how I have come to think about my painting and its subjects.”
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THE FACTS
`Julia Fish: Selected Paintings and Drawings 1985-1995′
When: Through Feb. 25
Where: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 5811 S. Ellis Ave.
Admission: Free
Call: 312-702-8670
Related event: Fish will be a guest disc jockey from 6:30 to 9 p.m. Jan. 30 on WHPK-FM 88.5.
