A Wet Posting
Back in the rich (for me) old days when I did quite a bit of work in advertising, I often had to draw things I knew very little about. Even then, the vast majority of subjects I dealt with were things biological, but I still had to admit ignorance about far too much of it. One of those subjects was fish. I’ve seldom fished, was never particularly interested in fish, and still look at them far too often as simply packets of protein-rich food for the mammals, birds and reptiles I draw. They are of course, in spite of how much I love sashimi, not simply food, but beautiful, vibriant creatures, some with absolutely amazing life histories. My educational inadequacies notwithstanding, I paint them, if I do say so myself, rather well. And I’ve painted a lot of them. Here are just a few.
Click here to see this image (almost) the size I painted it.
The rainbow trout (Oncorhynchus mykiss) is an acrylic painting I did 10 or more years ago for … (?) I honestly can’t remember! (If you’re out there please email me) I’ve probably drawn and painted a couple hundred trout and salmon over the years, and I can’t tell you what happened to most of the images. This one was done while I was living in Mammoth Lakes, in the Sierra Nevada of California. All I remember is that I was given the flies and streamers that surround the fish by an avid fisherman, and put color into the animal that the stocked rainbows of the “Lakes Basin” above town just didn’t have. It would have made more sense had I made the background a sage-covered hillside behind the willow and alder along Hot Creek, a great nearby fly-fishing stream.
These little mosquitofish (Gambusia holbrooki) were done through Split Rock Studios for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It was my second attempt at doing fish digitally in PhotoShop and I’m still very pleased with the result. The fish here are much larger than life size. I remember counting the scales on a number of fuzzy photographs. Not fun; nor was trying to wrap them accurately around the larger female.
The yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) and the Indo-Pacific blue marlin (Makaira mazara) are both acrylic paintings that were done for a project that never came to fruition. Again, I can’t remember exactly why I painted them, but it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Some of you have seen the yellowfin before as one of the many recycling background elements on PZ Myers’ Pharyngula.
That’s enough for now. I’m still getting used to the new WordPress setup, and with Brent Rasmussen laughing in the background as I stumble through the netherworld of computer software changes, I’m going for consistency. Once I’m up to speed with the new procedures I plan on posting each Tuesday and Friday. I need to push myself while establishing reasonable deadlines. I wish I could paint faster.
November 12th, 2006 at 10:58 am
Neat! I like the mosquitofish.
November 12th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Well now I’m really looking forward to Tuesday’s and Friday’s.
November 12th, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Alright! Now I have something to look forward on Tuesdays and Thursday!
November 12th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Wow. I love your art! I particularly like the mosquitofish for some reason.
Thanks for posting.
November 12th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Welcome back! We missed your art!
November 12th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Truly awesome! Thanks for sharing your fish!!!
November 12th, 2006 at 4:12 pm
Have you done placoderms, or Onchorhynchus rastrosus?
November 12th, 2006 at 6:14 pm
Nifty!
Hot Creek is one of the few (I’d imagine) trout streams where you can catch your fish already nicely poached — instant truit au bleu. We used to go skinnydipping there evenings in the off season (back when there was an off season and you could go skinny-dipping without being busted) at the point where the hot springs and vents enter the creek just east of 395. Every now and then I’d see a trout go by belly-up, evidently having ventured too close to the steam vents.
I loved sitting nose-deep in the water — hot, warm, cold, whatever temp we wanted; just move a yard or so to change it — and watching the shorebirds fly high overhead and the bats zip past our heads, and feeling the rock we sat on vibrating from the force of volcanic steam.
November 12th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
They look so good they made my mouth water and I had a hallucination of the smell of frying oil. Perhaps looking at good fish pictures, like going to the store, is not something to be done on an empty stomach. After dinner, I’ll come back - I’ll be able to focus on biology at that time.
November 12th, 2006 at 7:15 pm
Hey, welcome back Carl! You were gone for many months there, and I definitely missed your work. How’s the elephant photo coming along, by the way?
Ohh, and like a lot of the others in here, I really like the mosquitofish. It’s not that the other ones are poorly illustrated; I’m sure you captured all of the fish accurately. It’s just that the mosquitofish itself looks the coolest.
November 12th, 2006 at 8:15 pm
I like the trout best, myself. Not only is the fish fabulous, the background and the graphic layout of the thing is just sweet.
Ron Sullivan, *I* used to sit in Hot Creek too, all those years ago. I was there in … oh, starting in the winter of 1974. It was open to night visits up until about 1980, I’d guess, until one too many idiots killed themselves in it, and they shut it down. We took hot dogs out there a time or two and cooked them in one of those onshore live steam vents. (Hmm … I’m asking myself if the native Paiutes used to use the vents to cook on too. Interesting idea: Cooked food without fire.)
And yeah, the main thing I mention when I tell people the stories is that you could move downstream from a hot water vent — in that otherwise ice-cold water — and pick your favorite temperature. With the caveat that stream turbulence would visit you with a waft of butt-freezing water ever so often.
You might also remember that Hot Creek canyon was (is still) home to a huge colony of cliff swallows, and those were fun to watch too, if you went there in the daylight.
November 13th, 2006 at 12:55 am
You need to start selling t-shirts or something.
November 13th, 2006 at 1:35 am
Welcome back. You have been greatly missed.
November 13th, 2006 at 1:59 am
These are really good pictures, Carl. You say that you have little knowledge of fish, but I find them as magnificent as your pictures of mammals. Is it because I have even less knowledge of fish than you do, or because of some special strategy you’ve used to be able to draw good fish anyway?
November 13th, 2006 at 12:37 pm
Whether it is once or twice a week, it is good to have you back! I look forward to your future posts.
November 14th, 2006 at 3:20 am
I just came from archy. What a fascinating site you have. Well done!
November 14th, 2006 at 3:27 am
coturnix, I just read your post, above. I thought I was the only person whose mouth watered at the site of fish, alive, dead, or represented in two dimensions. I can’t take my daughter to the aquarium without going for sushi afterward! I felt so alone!
November 14th, 2006 at 5:22 pm
Great blog. It’s impressive how your traditional work and digital work seem to blend seamlessly. Really good control over your media! Thanks for your kind comments, again.
November 14th, 2006 at 8:54 pm
Hank, we were probably sitting in Hot Creek around the same time. We went with friends, hmm, I met her in nursing school in ‘74 or ‘75, and this would have been before ‘78 anyway, probably even earlier… Dang. We couldn’t have got there after the passes closed, but I do remember some dude who’d just hiked in over the snow for some unlikely distance. We gave him the hottest rock. It would’ve been September or October, I think.
I just asked Joe and he didn’t offhand remember cliffies, but did remember rock wren. Oh yeah. And I remember that bright-turquoise pool next to the path. We joked about dipping hotdogs on a string to boil them but never got around to it. I wonder if the Paiutes used it to cook; I wonder where one could find out about that.
November 16th, 2006 at 12:12 am
Ron, there are several other hot springs in the area. After Hot Creek was closed down (after dark, anyway), I frequented some of the others. Wonderful memories: going out 3 or 4 times a week to sit in the steamy water and watch the sun go down over the mountains, drinking a beer and savoring the moment while my dogs explored out in the brush. Sunset, moonrise, stars wheeling overhead in the dark.
(Anyone who’s never seen a high altitude night sky, you can’t imagine how brilliant it is. On winter nights, the full moon is bright enough to read by. On moonless summer nights, there are so many visible stars it’s hard to pick out the constellations. The mountain sky is STUNNING.)
I was just in California on vacation, and suddenly realized I was driving past one of the springs near Bridgeport. I zipped off the road and motored up to it. Still there: Travertine Hot Springs. Still hot, still wonderful. It was even more fun than I remembered, though, because a loud-mouthed mystic showed up and started regaling us with her interpretation of reality, which included “energy” and forces, spirits and reincarnation, even ancient aliens who enslaved and genetically manipulated ancient humans.
The fun part was that I’m more assertive these days, and after about 20 minutes came out with “Ahem. Just for a bit of balance, I’d like to tell everybody here that everything you just said is absolute nonsense. There’s a real world, a real reality, and it includes none of the stuff you just described.”
She was flabbergasted to hear somebody actually disagree with her, eventually telling me “You’re really annoying, and I don’t like you.”
Plane ticket: $314.
Rental car: $273.
Gasoline: $2.93 a gallon.
Sitting in a natural hot spring in beautiful mountain country and being privileged to shut up a blathering New Age airhead: Priceless.
November 16th, 2006 at 1:50 pm
Go Hank! Besides, I’ve always thought those stories were so much less interesting, so much more flat, that what we know of the real actual measureable stuff. And damn but some people don’t know when to STFU and listen to the world around them.
We didn’t make it over there this fall, but I think we’ll save our nickles for a room at the Virginia Settlement motel next year. I want a rematch with Bodie, for one thing, after I’ve polished my camera skills some. And I want to sit in the sage on a sunny day and smell it. Also pinyon jays, I want some pinyon jays.
And yes, that sky. Another of the things we’ve lost to “civilization” and don’t know it’s missing.
December 29th, 2006 at 2:44 am
Wow…Ron and Hank, you’ve made me really want to go and sit in a hot spring now. Are any of them open to the public the way they used to be for you guys? I wasn’t even born until 1979, and knowing today’s sue-happy enviroment, I probably won’t be able to go within a hundred yards of a hot spring, much less sit in it in the middle of the night.
Anyway, let me know, and I’ll add it to my ‘must travel to’ list.
December 1st, 2007 at 12:32 pm
Your Gambusia look like wild-type guppies to me, give or take a spot or two on the male’s tail. When I saw them I thought, “Guppies!” I used to have some and I’m fascinated by the ecological analysis of the evolutionary pressures between Number of Predators in a stream vs. how flashy the males can be to attract females, without getting eaten. Predictably, and I use that word precisely, the fewer predators the brighter the males.
OTOH I had a colleague who raised chichlids and she thought of guppies as fish food.