An exhibition that is sure to attract icthyophiles of all ages has just opened in the Schumann and Titelman Galleries at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. “Ocean Fishes” features watercolor paintings by artist and naturalist James Prosek. The show includes life-size pictures of sea bass, bonito, cobia, grouper, blue fin tuna, sailfish and shark.
Prosek says that he seeks to give his audience an up-close and personal experience with his models by painting them true to size and shimmering with the colors of life.
“Not many people get the opportunity to be on the boat to see these things when they are still alive,” he says.
“You get a piece of it, in the fish market – a chunk of swordfish – but not many people know what it really looks like when they’re still alive. So I wanted to represent them at that moment.”
It all started in 1996, when then 20-year-old James Prosek produced his first book, “Trout: An Illustrated History.” Published by Knopf, the book features the artist’s meticulous watercolor renderings of 70 North American trout species.
Prosek knows of what he paints. An avid fisherman since boyhood, he searched for a book that catalogued trout in the same way that Audubon cataloged birds. Finding none, he created one himself.
Prosek’s passion for trout was rewarded by his readers who were, perhaps, lured to his book by the praise given it in a New York Times review that said Prosek had “a fair bid to become the Audubon of the fishing world.”
Now 40, Prosek has an additional 13 books to his credit. Many of them are about trout and trout fishing (“Trout of the World” came out in 2003; a revised edition appeared in 2013), but in recent years Prosek’s interests have branched out to include birds, insects, African mammals, flowers and even hybrid creatures: a fox with a blackbird’s wings, a parrot fish with the head of a macaw, a cockatoo whose erect crest reveals the implements of a Swiss army knife.
Prosek’s technical arsenal has also expanded to include oil paintings on canvas and wood; cut paper murals; mixed media sculpture, and photography.
The Vero Beach show focuses on saltwater fish, painted in watercolor and gouache (opaque watercolor) augmented with touches of colored pencil on paper.
Depicted in strict profile, the fish are not presented as in life, swimming through a watery environment. They are instead limned in complete stillness, isolated against the warm brown tones of the tea-stained paper the artist favors.
Prosek traveled to see the fish that he painted for “Ocean Fishes.” The pictures in the exhibition are the result of expeditions on both commercial and sport-fishing boats that plied the waters of such places as Block Island, RI; Montauk, NY; Marco Island, FL; Andros Island, Bahamas and the West African island nation of Cape Verde.
Although the fish caught on these boats were killed, Prosek stresses that he went along only as an observer who, after a fish was landed, took photographs, made sketches and measured it in preparation for the painting that he would execute in his Easton, CT, studio.
Because each painting is based on a single specimen, Prosek thinks of them as portraits of individuals, rather than composite rendering of species.
A fish painting that is in the Ocean Fishes book but not in the show is of a nearly 13-foot-long blue marlin that was caught off the coast of Cape Verde. That painting, featured in a 2014 exhibition called “All Creatures – Great and Small” was purchased in 2012 by the exhibition’s host, New Britain Museum of American Art. According to a 2014 article in the New York Times, Prosek observed the landed fish as its colors faded “from their living vibrancy to the muted tones of death.”
Prosek, who in his early trout-fishing days was a catch-and-release man, admits to having mixed feelings about the demise of such a magnificent creature.
“Of course, I don’t like watching big animals die, but there’s part of me that can override those feelings because I’m so fascinated by seeing this fish, it’s just so incredible. I was so overwhelmed with awe at being able to touch this thing that was still partly alive. It was just a beautiful animal.”
Observing animals in death is not new to visual documentarians. The artist with whom Prosek has been compared, John James Audubon, was an avid hunter and fisherman in his youth, who learned taxidermy when he decided to create his own nature museum. In addition to sketching birds and their habitats from life, Audubon shot (and had others shoot) the birds that he painted. Their stuffed skins guided Audubon in creating his mixed media drawings of them.
The subject of Prosek’s most recent painting, a great white shark, survived its encounter with the artist.
“That one is based on an individual male white shark that I saw last summer off of Cape Cod,” says Prosek.
He viewed the 12 ½-foot fish in the company of a biologist who studies sharks. They found the specimen with the help of a spotter plane that flew over the water and directed the boat to it.
“We watched him free swimming for, like, half an hour,” says Prosek. “We just motored alongside of it. They’re so big they just really don’t seem to care.”
To date the shark is the biggest fish that Prosek has painted.
“This fish would probably weigh 2,000 pounds,” he says, adding that the blue marlin, one of the largest fish he has previously painted, weighed a mere 696 pounds.
In recent years Prosek has taken to exhibiting taxidermy specimens along with his artworks. While there are no mounted fish in the “Ocean Fishes” galleries, live fish common to the Indian River lagoon will be on display in a 500-gallon tank in the glass-roofed Buck Atrium. That exhibit is courtesy of the Indian River Land Trust in association with the Bonefish and Tarpon Trust and the Florida Institute of Technology.
In the Schumann and Titelman Galleries, Prosek’s paintings of fish species that can be found in Florida’s waters include a tarpon in watercolor, gouache, colored pencil and graphite on paper. The 50-inch-wide painting presents the fish, its silvery flank glistening like plated armor, a little above center on the reddish-brown sheet. Below the fish, to right and left, are a lobster and a cluster of sea grape leaves.
Artistic license, rather than scientific classification, place them in proximity to the tarpon. The vignettes add variety and additional color to the main subject, which otherwise might look a little lonely on the page.
And although the model for Prosek’s portrait of a short-fin mako shark was caught near Montauk, NY, the shark is known as a game fish here in Florida, too. The average adult specimen measures 10 feet in length; Prosek’s fish is about a seven-footer. The vivid blue and white creature, its open mouth bristling with hooked teeth, is complimented by the depictions of a flowering eastern prickly pear cactus at lower left and a Maine lobster at lower right.
In the show is a work five feet tall and 11 ½ feet wide to accommodate a blue fin tuna’s streamlined bulk. Shining in iridescent colors of purple, aqua, and green, the big fish is the only one in the exhibition portrayed against a stark white background.
Two other striking depictions in the show are of a mutton snapper and a Nassau grouper, each caught near South Andros Island. The snapper is a colorful fish with a bronze body shading to pink at its belly and deep red on the lower part of its tail fin. The grouper is decked out in vertical stripes of black and silver with yellow barbs at the top of its dorsal fin. The artist’s penciled description beneath the fish notes that it was pregnant when it was “caught in traps by Tinker Rock.”
With details like that, viewers might start to feel themselves identifying with the fish in the pictures.
That’s just what Prosek has in mind.
“The point of a lot of these paintings is to show an individual fish that’s been through its own hardships and experiences, and it wears those experiences on its body. It’s to give people the feeling that fish are like we are – every one of us is different.”