Janet Fish drew on her embrace of change and her belief in the underlying interconnectedness of things to fuel her remarkable painting practice.  She philosophized that to stop changing is to die, a conviction that drove her unending formal experimentation and her mastery of multiple genres.  Change inhabits each painting as well.  The objects that serve as armatures for color and light in her work are exuberant in their state of flux.  The long conceptual, formal, and iconographic history of the still life genre confirms our own experience.  Though the artist worked against the idea of capturing a photographic instant, she preserves a mood, a quality of light, and a sense of place to which we can continually return.

Fish attributed her fascination with light and intense color to having grown up amid the dazzling brightness and vibrant tropical colors of Bermuda.  An artistic family also contributed to Fish’s early interest in art: her grandfather was Clark Voorhees, the American Impressionist; her mother and uncle were sculptors; and her father occasionally taught Art History. 

In 1963 Janet Fish received her MFA from Yale, where her fellow students included Chuck Close, Rackstraw Downes, Nancy Graves, Robert Mangold, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and Richard Serra, a tight-knit group who formed an intense, ambitious, competitive cohort that motivated one another to develop and defend their work. After graduation Fish moved to New York City. Her paintings from the late 60s and early 70s, studies of transparent objects, begin a life-long preoccupation with the nature and substance of light. From the beginning, Fish focused on commonplace objects, insisting that her subject matter, glasses, fruits covered in supermarket cellophane, or liquid filled containers, was unimportant.  For Fish the subject matter or story line, was of the least importance, for her meaning was determined by tone, gesture, color, light, and scale.

During the 1970s, Fish gradually opened up the backgrounds of her paintings and introduced more color and complexity. Beginning in 1978, she spent half the year in New York and half in the Green Mountains of Vermont.  The shift to Vermont coincided with the incorporation of still life, human figures and landscape into increasingly complex scenes in which color, light, and shadow are masterfully handled. 

A monograph on Fish's work, Janet Fish: Paintings by Vincent Katz, was published by Harry N. Abrams in 2002 and a catalogue raisonne of Fish's prints, The Prints of Janet Fish by Linda Konheim Kramer, was published by John Szoke Graphics in 1997.

Fish’s work is in the collections of numerous institutions including the Art Insitute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; Cleveland Museum of Art; Dallas Museum of Art; Detroit Insitute of Arts; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Yale University Art Gallery.