NORTHAMPTON - The small, self-titled exhibit of prints by Janet Fish at the Smith College Museum of Art is cogent and lucidly instructive. It's perfect for a college museum, and for anyone who cares to see the way a printmaker (at least a lithographer or a screenprint maker) builds an image, color by color. For someone who has more experience with paint - and that includes anyone who used finger paints in nursery school - the printmaking process can seem bollixing and counterintuitive.
Fish, too, is a painter first. Her sparkling still life "Herb Tea'' is in the museum's contemporary collection gallery. A Smith alum who graduated in 1960, Fish came of age as a realist in an art world that spurned realism. At Yale, where she got her masters in 1963, Abstract Expressionism was fostered. She tried that and felt uneasy. Fish, who grew up in a family of artists, ultimately stuck to her own passions, and has been credited with helping to revive realism in the 1970s.
"Herb Tea,'' painted in 1995, is typical of her work: a shimmering still life, cascading with light, exploring transparency. The centerpiece is a glass teapot half-filled with red tea. Light pours through it and puddles below, glowing like a faceted ruby. The composition, with slashing diagonal strokes, keeps the eye darting over the canvas, discovering new sparkles and new passageways for light, such as a crinkling spread of plastic wrap upon which sits a lemon. One of the ironies of Fish's penetrating investigation of transparency is that she builds it with largely opaque tones.
A painting is one big gestalt. The painter dabs, smears, sometimes scrapes. It's often intuitive. Lithography demands more planning. Preparatory drawing. A map. A clear sense from the beginning of what the end product will be, and the steps that must be taken to achieve it.
Fish made "Winsom's Shells'' in 1985 at the Smith College Print Workshop over the space of a week, and in addition to the final print, there are several proofs on view in the artist's printmaking show.
In this work, she puts aside her fascination with translucency and turns instead to pattern and surface texture to keep the eye moving. This still life dances with speckles. Several dotted shells zigzag, one to the next, down a sheet of newspaper, upon which the illegible newsprint provides another spotty pattern. To the right, more diagonals, as matchboxes line up on a wood table, some open to show more shells. Shadows pop the objects into three-dimensionality.
Each of the 11 colors in this print was produced on a separate plate or screen. The first proof here features just two grays, sketching out the newspaper, the shadows, and certain contours of shell. The next features solely screenprinted elements: a mustard for the tabletop, a brown spider web pattern on one shell, undertones on the matchboxes. Step by step, Fish added texture and hue.
It wasn't all clear-cut from the beginning. Fish experimented. Toward the end, she changed the black-on-red dots on one shell for red-on-black, which plays better off the newspaper background.
Seeing the print built like this, bit by bit, is like watching a jigsaw puzzle come together. Every piece, every tiny increment of pigment, has its place, and must be plotted. Where's the gestalt in that?
Most viewers don't think like printmakers. We see the whole: We savor the lively composition, the welcoming tones, the bristling patterns. There's a small number of other prints in this show, without the proofs, with no evidence of process. Looking at the lithograph "Rosehips Nest'' (2004), my eye doesn't identify opaque passages linked seamlessly on the page, all printed in separate runs. I see a sweet spring still life: A pitcher of lemonade, green glass saucers shot with sunlight; a cake plate with green and pink squiggles echoing antic gestures delineating a nearby bird's nest filled with eggs.
Of course, it's a romantic myth that artists conjure beauty out of thin air, or that painters don't think ahead. Sometimes they fail miserably and start again with a clearer idea of where they are going. Sometimes, as master technicians, they know exactly what they are up to. Then, too, printmakers may chart their way, and get lost and happen into delightful surprises. And there are processes that fall in between, or combine elements of both, such as the monoprint.
Still, the painter habitually moves forward; the printmaker habitually maps backward. Fish studied printmaking at Smith, under the imposing Leonard Baskin, but she started her career, and continues it, as a painter. She picked up printmaking again in the 1970s (her first professional print, "Cherries in Brandy,'' 1973, is on view) and remains active in both mediums.
"Any time you do something different, it pushes you a little,'' she says, quoted in exhibition wall text. "You can rethink ideas in one medium which makes you handle other materials differently. It keeps you awake.''
Cate McQuaid can be reached at catemcquaid@gmail.com.