Beyond Classifications
Prosek's first book, Trout of the World, grew out of his boyhood love of trout, an enthusiasm pursued in a pre-internet age by writing letters to biologist and poring through library tomes of natural history. At the beginning, recalls Prosek, he thought the classification of salmonids — the fish family spanning trout and salmon — into different species was biologically ordained.
The more Prosek learned, however, the more lines blurred. A blueback trout, for instance, is simply an Arctic char that happens to live in a different place. Rainbow trout and brown trout share an appellation, but are only distantly related. When the ranges of certain species overlap, such as cutthroat and rainbow trout, they often mate with one another and hybridize, despite their ostensible differences.
"What I'd thought of as a kid as some kind of rigid system, I learned was a complete mess," said Prosek. And whereas his early paintings were often based on illustrations and written descriptions, striving towards archetypal representations of species, Prosek's travels for his next projects — Fly-Fishing the 41st and Trout of the World — taught him that even individuals of the same subspecies were often quite different.
As much as Prosek loved natural history's illustrations, he realized that the notion of archetype was an illusion, too. Out of this came his decision to paint single, specific individuals in Ocean Fishes.
"I wanted to make it clear that I wasn't painting a fish to represent a species in a field guide, but an individual. This is one fish I saw," said Prosek, who saw the bluefin tuna above harpooned in Cape Cod Bay. "But from doing that, I learned that even if you've seen the fish, you still can't depict a fish as dynamic and constantly changing as a tuna. When you pull a tuna out of the water, it's pulsing with color and life. It's like a reflection on the water. You can't capture that in one picture."
Image: James Prosek (High-Resolution Version)