"An elegant use of foliage and grace and a little piece of white cloth and oil." -Gertrude Stein

This is the first publication to document and critically discuss the work of this acclaimed Chicago-based painter, featuring essays by Judith Russi Kirshner and Harold L. Johnson.

Fish's meticulously crafted paintings of the natural world and views of her immediate domestic environment call attention to the act of seeing and raise issues of how the painted image mediates our understanding of what is represented. Kirschner's astute essay explores the conceptual and art historical implications of Fish's technique, and discusses the artist's use of the dynamic tension between naturalistic realism and formal abstraction. Johnson's diary transcriptions relate his experience of the poetry and the conditions of memory in Fish's work, describing her paintings as "a distillation in time from a state of mind and emotion."

1996, 36 pp., 16 col., 5 b/w illus., paperback

Related exhibition: Julia Fish, View - Selected Drawings and Paintings 1985-1995 (1996)