Prints, piece by piece

This is an oil painting, “Herb Tea,” by Janet Fish, on view in the contemporary collection gallery at the Smith College Museum of Art. It shows what Fish does best with her realist still lifes – she builds layers upon layers of translucency so that the whole piece is a luminous shimmer. Fish has a small, instructive show of prints in an upstairs gallery at the museum, and it’s kind of stunning to view the prints in the context of “Herb Tea.” Most of them are proofs, building up to the final lithograph and screenprint, “Winsom’s Shells.” The proofs show us the artist constructing the print color by color. At right, you can see in proof number two that she’s put in grays, ochers, and the stray red. The exhibit demonstrates how certain types of printmaker must plot step by step, thinking back from a vision of the finished work to the very beginning. Unlike painters, who tend to move forward, dab by dab – unless they’re Rubens, with his raft of assistants, or LeWitt, with his detailed instructions. In either case, there’s always experimentation and failure, as well as happy surprises. And many painters, such as Fish herself, also work in printmaking. “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.’’