In Bermuda, we are awash in colour. At any given moment, a glimpse of the ocean or a poinciana tree in full bloom can disrupt a mundane task with a startling visual moment. Colour deepens our daily rhythms and embellishes our experiences.

Bermuda’s colour, particularly, was on my mind as I visited Masterworks Museum of Bermuda Art to see its recent exhibition, Janet Fish: Place and Time, on view through April 18.

Fish, who spent her formative years on the island, is one of the contemporary era’s most accomplished still-life painters, particularly known for her use of radiant colour carefully describing objects arranged in complex compositions.

It becomes abundantly clear after spending time with these paintings just how significant Bermuda’s colour was to her practice and vision well after she left the island.

Organised in collaboration with DC Moore Gallery in New York, this is only the second retrospective held on Fish’s career, and the first comprehensive exhibition of her work in Bermuda.

Curators Sara Thom and Melissa Messina trace the path of her connection to the island from her grandfather, artist Clark G Voorhees, who wintered in Bermuda from 1919, through Fish’s early years on the island, living with her family at Cluster Cottage in Warwick, to her later career in New York and Vermont.

An accompanying catalogue, which includes two insightful essays and high-resolution colour images, draws from over five decades to allow the viewer continuous exploration of Fish’s distinctive colour and light.

Such a personal review of her career would not have been possible without Fish’s direct involvement. Indeed, it was her idea.

In the catalogue’s A Note from the Artist, Fish explains: “The beauty, colour, and scale of the island made an impact on how I see the world and how I make art.”

Although she returned to the island only rarely after graduating from Bermuda High School and departing for Smith College in 1956, Bermuda’s impact is evident in every painting, from the earliest studies of transparency in the 1960s to the later dreamlike examples of the early 2000s.

Paintings from her early years, hanging near the entrance, indicate her early negotiation with abstraction. Paintings like Plantains in a Box (1969) — completed when hard-edged, minimalist abstraction dominated the New York gallery scene — combine precise description with abstract swirls referencing the reflected colour off the cellophane packaging. At once realist and abstract, the painting foreshadows a career full of layers: layers of colour, layers of surfaces, and layers of meaning.

By the time of this work, Fish was already living in New York. Nevertheless, echoes of Bermuda continue to emerge through luminous gradations of overlapping objects.

A prismatic lightness pervades, even when the subject is an urban interior, like in Leslie’s Zinnias (1978). The vivid and varied colour of the foreground still-life distracts from the grey exterior architecture and fire escape outside the window. In addition, the flowers are flanked by seashells, which frequently appear in her paintings from every period and are reminiscent of her years by the ocean.

To suggest an early visual influence over this play of light and colour, Thom, in her catalogue essay, highlights Fish’s use of glass as relating to her early years in Bermuda, when her father would scavenge bottles from around the cottage to display in the windows. A photograph included in the gallery and catalogue records this visual memory, showing how the light filtering through coloured glass formed part of her childhood setting.

In essence, Fish’s artistic process began with objects like the glasses and vases. She painstakingly orchestrates the composition and considers every opportunity to overlap colours and transparent surfaces.

In the case of Leslie’s Zinnias, the rose-tinted vase reveals objects behind it, including the grey city seen through the distortion of the glass. Here, again, the visual stimuli of Bermuda’s landscape, its density and converging planes, resonate in compositions like these.

This complexity is likewise on view nearby in Fish’s 1981 painting, Mirror and Shell. The shadow of the crystal vase allows for the expansion of colour beyond the object, reflected from the mirror and off the tile surface. A yellow tulip is mirrored in the window, and the colours from the vase extend into the shadow, linking objects through chromatic repetition. Colours and shapes interlock the objects to form an intricate unity.

Fish used and reused the objects she collected throughout her career, accumulating a multitude over the years. To heighten the tangibility of the paintings, Masterworks displays some of these objects in view of the paintings in which they appear.

Considering the elaborate compositional structures Fish achieves with her layers of objects, I was expecting to see the stillness of a meticulous finish. I have seen her paintings reproduced photographically many times, and have always considered her work to suggest the methodical and precise.

In person, her works are so much more. The vibrancy of colour parallels the vivacity of her brushstrokes. This part of her process was a point of discussion at the “Curated Conversation with Melissa Messina” held in the gallery on November 15. Two well-respected Bermudian artists in attendance were stymied by the spontaneity of these brushstrokes, which defied the careful organisation of the composition.

Given that Fish did not use studies or preparatory drawings for the works on view, instead composing directly on the canvas, these paintings appear, inexplicably, to have “just happened”.

In addition to overlapping areas of colour and layers of surfaces, Fish layers art historical references within her work. The height of the still-life painting tradition is 17th-century Holland, where artists would often allude to the passage of time, the seasons, the five senses, among other themes.

Fish, if not directly alluding to historical themes, nevertheless allows for these connections. In her Parakeet and Tropical Fruit (1991), smell is indicated through the fragrance of freesia, sound through the presence of the songbird, taste through the opened papaya, and vision through the panoply of colour. The work cannot be reduced to this meaning alone, but Fish does not prevent this additional layer of meaning.

Luckily for Bermudians, there is time to consider this interpretation. Newly acquired through the generosity of donors, Parakeet and Tropical Fruit has found a home in Masterworks’ permanent collection.

The most recent paintings in the exhibition, ironically, move closer to Fish’s early years in Bermuda. Paintings like Atlantis or Orchids and Shells recall ocean views, perhaps from Cluster Cottage in Warwick, her parents' home, or nearby Warwick Long Bay. Darkened, enriched hues depict a world far from New York or Vermont, again suggesting echoes from her Bermuda past.

Throughout Janet Fish: Place and Time, Bermuda functions as both origin and echo, even when her still-life setting is far from its shores. Thanks to the collaboration and support of the Janet Fish Foundation, BWS-Boss Ltd, Rosewood Bermuda, and Demco — not to mention Fish and her family, several of whom attended the opening — the impact of the island on Fish’s creative vision is on colourful display.