Mounted in Paint
The author—a sportsman, naturalist, and artist—wanted to capture a sight few people have ever seen: the illuminated glory of the greatest game fish in the open seaMounted in Paint
The author—a sportsman, naturalist, and artist—wanted to capture a sight few people have ever seen: the illuminated glory of the greatest game fish in the open sea
The author recently converted his Connecticut barn into his dream work space: the ground floor (above) can serve as a gallery, while the upstairs is a kind of open-air filing cabinet for his many ideas, which, contrary to appearance, are methodically arranged in stacks.
01
Giant Bluefin, Cape CodSome years ago, after I had voyaged the world painting the many different species of trout, I began to document large examples of specific ocean fishes based on individuals that I traveled to see. I wanted to see them—bluefin tuna, marlin, swordfish—in their living colors and paint them life-size on a big piece of paper using elemental materials and primitive tools: ground mineral pigments suspended in a water-soluble binder like gum arabic (hardened sap from an acacia tree); graphite; cotton-and-wood pulp paper; wood-handled brushes tipped with animal hair. Along the way, I adopted and adapted, mixing powdered mica with the paint to achieve other effects—like the mirrored sheen on some of these fishes.
Since I was a child, I’ve been documenting things in nature through close observation, with just a pencil at first. It was and is my personal way of making inquiries of the world, how I navigate life. The specific goal has never been accuracy or making an idealized version of a species of the kind you would see in a field guide. I’m not sure what the goal is, if there is one specifically, other than capturing what I feel as much as what I see, trying—whether on a mountain, the ocean, or a river—to pause time, to create the illusion of permanence in a shifting world.
I have long liked fish, perhaps because I find the medium in which they live deceptive and mysterious. Water reflects our world back to us when we gaze at its surface, while concealing what is happening beneath. In the origin and history of drawing, the conversion of a three-dimensional world to a two-dimensional surface, water and its mirroring qualities were likely instructive.
Top, Prosek’s painting of a twelve-foot tuna; scenes from the trip where he painted the fish.
Most often people see drawings of a fish in a field guide, where a single depiction of a marlin or a swordfish at much reduced scale is meant to represent an entire species, an idealized version of a unit of biodiversity. By painting them life-size with all their individual scabs and scars, visual records of the residue of their lives in the ocean, I intended to work against the necessary reduction of everyday communication, the fragmentation that we subject nature to when we name and order the world, pushing against the maps we make to navigate, reminding us that they are not, and can never be, the territory they describe.
The allure of ocean fishes has caught the imagination of more than one writer—Ernest Hemingway and Zane Grey come to mind, as well as, memorably, Elizabeth Bishop in her poem “The Fish,” and American artists like Winslow Homer, most sublimely in paintings like The Gulf Stream. But, remarkably, given how much humans know, or think they know, the life history of these big fishes is still largely a mystery and depictions of them at scale, which capture what it feels like to see them up close, are rare. Very few people have had intimate experiences with these fishes for good reason. It takes quite a bit of effort and time—not to mention a little luck—to see them.
My luck began in 2004. My mother was then living in Chatham, Massachusetts, and as mothers do, telling a man—the owner of a Citgo gas station in town—about her son who painted watercolors of fish. The owner, a native of Cape Cod named Norman St. Pierre, was also a tuna spotter; the photos he’d tacked to the wall showing a boat filled with bluefin tuna larger than humans was what had sparked the conversation. As a spotter, he flew a little Cessna airplane over the ocean looking for giant bluefin, while a fishing boat below awaited his instructions. Once he radioed the location of a school, the fisherman would motor to the fish to spear them with harpoons. My mother gave Norman a copy of my first book Trout: An Illustrated History—and his response was remarkable. He not only offered to take me up in his plane but to arrange for me to go on the boat with the harpooner. This was a great gift. Commercial fishermen aren’t known to go out of their way to invite random civilians into their highly insular world, where they and what they pursue can be observed.
That summer, I drove up to Chatham and flew with Norman, who showed me the sea from the air, pointing out basking sharks and sea turtles, dolphins and humpback whales, and the shoals at Monomoy Island covered in seals which would, in the coming years, attract good numbers of Atlantic great white sharks. I spent three days in the sky with Norman and two on the water with a father-and-son team of fishermen he worked with. On the last hour of the last day on the Cape, Norman spotted a school of giant tuna, averaging about 800 lbs., and he guided the boat there. (At the time, such a specimen could fetch a price of over $10,000 at the dock, to be auctioned at Tsukiji Market in Japan.) As we closed in, the father ran out to the end of the pulpit—a long platform that sticks off the bow—with his son at the wheel, and harpooned two in a short, adrenaline-filled amount of time. When the fish were pulled on deck, they were pulsing with light, a light that flickered and danced like auroras on their skin, dynamic like an oil slick on the surface of water.
How could I possibly capture this already vanishing moment—where the life-light of the fish met the light of the sun unmediated by the surface of the water? There of course was no single way—whatever I made would be a personal interpretation, not just of this individual fish, but of the experience of seeing it and myself reflected in it—an autobiography and a portrait, a moment of being alive in space witnessing a magnificent animal expire. I nonetheless got to work and, as we motored back to the harbor in Barnstable, I began the measuring, the sketching, making notes, and seeing the colors disappear with life—that, after getting back to my studio in Easton, Connecticut, would result, in the coming months, in a watercolor nearly 12 feet long.
02
Blue Marlin, Cape Verde IslandsThe marlin captain I had been corresponding with, a guy named Peter B. Wright, told me that the Cape Verde islands, about 350 nautical miles west of Senegal, was the place that I was most likely to glimpse a large blue marlin, and the anglers he guided usually kept what they caught to give to the local people. This way, I would be able to see the fish alive in its element and have time with it out of the water.
We traveled to Cape Verde in 2011 with two American anglers that Peter had talked into being a part of our quest: finding a large marlin for me to paint. I didn’t care to catch the fish myself and was just as happy observing. With marlin fishing, the boat itself is the first lure. Peter swore that certain boats drew more fish from the depths because the sounds of their engines, plus the nature of the air they circulated into the water with the propellers, their wake and bubbles, created some arc of artifice that attracted the attention of marlin.
Why, suddenly, did a searching bill of a lone marlin appear above the surface of the water, swinging back and forth like a witch’s broomstick, seemingly disassociated from the fish beneath it? Mysteries such as this filled the moments and hours of silence with speculative conversation. On a fishing vessel, both sportfishing and commercial, there is often a lot of downtime—motoring from one place to another to try to locate fish, set the lines, check the lines, and change bait. Peter was from Fort Lauderdale and liked to spin a yarn—hence, his nickname, “Lauderdale Lips.” With him, the long hours passed pleasantly.
In the world of big-game fishing, Peter had spent more time on the water looking for marlin—from the Azores to the Carolinas, Cape Verde to Cairns—and had likely seen more granders (a marlin over a thousand pounds) caught than anyone alive. So, when he told us during one of those lulls of time that he’d once seen a blue marlin he estimated was 3,000 lbs.—a fish large enough to swallow a grown sea turtle whole—we believed him, or at least wanted to. The record blue marlin caught on a rod and line was about 1,400 lbs.—the record black marlin about 1,500 lbs. Well, fish tales are part of what makes fishing fishing.
A shot of the Cape Verde Islands, which are located off the coast of Senegal; Prosek’s marlin guide, Peter B. Wright, hooking a fish in his younger days.
Large marlin are very strong fish and require specialized tackle and lots of experience to fight and land, and there are risks involved. Peter also told stories of the accidents that can occur when humans tangle with large creatures they should probably leave alone. First mates sometimes get pulled overboard the monofilament line or wire leader accidentally gets wrapped around an arm or ankle, and they get pulled into the depths, the fish sounding and sounding and both expiring in tandem, sinking and tumbling to the bottom.
After five days of such talk while pulling teasers, lures, and bait for 8–10 hours through sun and salt spray, we’d had only one hookup: a big marlin, but the line had likely gotten wrapped around its tail, which made it almost impossible to pull the fish up from the depths. After an hour on the line, they had to cut it off.
We extended the trip for a day and, just as it had been in Cape Cod, we got the fish I hoped to see at the last hour. A beautiful fish, about 750 lbs., was hooked, and after a fight of about 40 minutes, was in the boat. It was a magnificent creature, about 13 feet long. It became the subject of my largest painting to date, which is now in the permanent collection of the New Britain Museum of American Art.
One thing I’ve only thought about more recently (as I get older) is that the moment I always felt these fishes looked most beautiful, when they crossed from their element into ours, from water to air, lit with their own internal light and colors and by the sun, was also when they were crossing from life into death. I suppose it doesn’t help that Peter himself died last year, at the age of 79.
03
Swordfish, Nova Scotia
Swordfish have unusually large eyes, which help them forage at great depths; side-by-side comparison of the photo that inspired the painting; and, below, Prosek takes notes aboard a fishing boat.
There are only a few places in the world where the conditions are such that swordfish come to the surface of the ocean and can be spotted and harpooned. One of them traditionally is Georges Bank, legendary fishing grounds south of Nova Scotia, Canada, and east of Cape Cod in the Gulf of Maine. Swordfish have to come up to warmer water near the surface to heat up a mechanism in their brains that allows them to see and forage in deep cold water. If the surface of the water is very cold, as it historically has been over Georges Bank, the fish have to literally break the surface of the water, exposing their heads directly to the sun. In doing so, they also expose their dorsal fin and tail to the air, making them easy to spot and spear.
In July of 2010, having spent several years trying to get on a commercial harpoon boat for swordfish, I drove up to Woods Harbour, Nova Scotia, from my home in Connecticut. I had finally been given an official invitation and was here to find the boat and get aboard. As I wandered down the long dock, I saw a boat unloading about a dozen swordfish. They were now just grey lumps of flesh, absent their heads and tails, being hoisted up out of the boat’s ice wells and into a truck. An old fisherman stood on deck. “So, what brings you out here?” he said. I told him I’d just driven 22 hours to see a swordfish right out of the water so I could paint it life-size in its living colors.
Swordfish have unusually large eyes, which help them forage at great depths; side-by-side comparison of the photo that inspired the painting; and, below, Prosek takes notes aboard a fishing boat.
“You’ve never seen a color blue on land like the color of a swordfish,” he said. “If you ever met a girl with eyes the color of a swordfish, you’d leave whoever you were with and go with her.”
His name was Gilbert Devine and he was the captain of The Brittany & James. Just like that, without my having to ask, he said I could join him the next day for a week at sea. I could sleep, he added, in a bunk where they usually kept the life preservers. Having been unable to get on a boat for several years, I now had the choice between two; Gilbert’s invitation (and his story) appealed to me. He also convinced me that his boat was the best in the fleet, with the tallest tower to spot fish 65 feet above the surface of the water. And so, the next day, I jumped on deck.
When a swordfish is harpooned, the harpoon head is connected by a line to a buoy, and it is left to drift until it’s dead or nearly dead. It’s simply too dangerous to bring a swordfish on deck alive—after all, it has a spear on its nose. As a result, most of the time when such a fish comes on board, she’s a coppery-bronze color, not the silver and blue they are alive. Gilbert told me that about one out of every hundred fish or so will flicker back to their living colors on the deck before they die. This is what I hoped for.
We caught at least one fish every day. Most of the time, I was there at the moment that Gilbert ran out on the pulpit (or “stand,” as they call it in Canada), grabbed the harpoon, and thrust it at the fish. In this moment, the fish was free swimming below him, and I could see the incredible purple blue of its back that he spoke of. But once the fish made it to the boat, it was a deep metallic bronze color.
Then, once again, on the last day of the trip, the last fish of the day transformed on deck from the bronze-brown color of death to the platinum silver and the purple blues of life that Gilbert had told me about. Very few swordfishermen and almost no non-fishers have seen this phenomenon—a fish on deck showing off its living colors, as if it were still in the water.
Swordfish have magnificently large eyes. When I looked into the eye of this particular fish, I realized it was so big that I could see my own reflection in it, as well as the rigging of the boat over my shoulder—and behind that, a small white light. As a kid, when I was obsessed with painting trout, the last thing I would add to the painting was a small white highlight on the eye. It seemed to make the whole painting come alive, just a little dab of white gouache, like magic. I never really questioned what that dot actually was, what it represented, or why it was so important, until I looked into the eye of the swordfish and realized that that small white dot was the sun. Staring back at me through all these years, there it briefly was, the fire responsible for the existence of all life on Earth, the star that orients us in our solar system, caught in a reflection that would soon go dim.
