About this work
The invention of oil paint in the fifteenth century introduced a quality of translucency to pigments that was impossible with the earlier opaque egg-tempera medium. Since then, effects of transparency have enthralled painters. For Janet Fish, the clear plastic wrappers of supermarket items first ‘got me interested in reflections, and then that became more defined as light, and then as I painted the glass, I started to paint light. My subject was what happened within the object. The paintings at that time weren’t about the environment at all, but were about the objects themselves.’