In 1982 Julia Fish was painting mostly abstract pictures. Then she did a drawing of a tree. She thought she’d created it entirely in her imagination, but later discovered a tree that looked just like it in a garden that she often walked by. Realizing she’d unknowingly drawn it from memory “was probably the most troubling thing that’s ever happened to me as an artist,” she says, because it “belied what I thought about myself and my capacities to invent.” This discovery led to Fish’s transformation from a form-inventing abstractionist to an artist basing her work on the language of nature.
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Born in Toledo, Oregon, Fish lived next to a canyon lush with vegetation. It was “right out the back door,” she recalls. “My sister and brother, the whole neighborhood, played in this canyon; it was an entire world for us. We named things. Ivy grew on trees and hung down, making a sort of fort–‘the ivy fort.’ Three trees close to each other with only moss between were ‘the three brothers.’” Fish says she was “very tactile. I remember how things felt to touch them, to lay on them, and I realize now how strongly my senses of sight and touch were linked.”
Study for Wintered #2 is based on the mud of March. Dark shadows cover its field of speckled green, blue, and yellow chalk pastel. The grainy color suggests we’re close to the ground, but the shadows could be from clouds, implying a distant, aerial view.
