Fish Images Emerging, #2

White Perch Emerging (watercolour, 8 x 5 in.)

Here are three more "progress images" from the freshwater fish I painted this spring for the New Brunswick Museum, to be published by the Department of Fisheries & Oceans in their identification cards series. The finished paintings are "biological illustrations", but the stage in which each painting emerges from the paper, is Art.

Golden Shiner Emerging (watercolour, 8 x 5 in.)

I have no "formula" for painting fish scales across different species. Some have regular rows of scales, with well-defined scale margins, but even then, the rows curve, and increase and decrease like rows of knitting - behind the head, toward the tail, and sometimes in the middle. Then there are those species in which scale row irregularities vary between individuals, and those whose scales, although arranged in rows, are so thin and transparent that the edges are not visible - just the impressions the rows make in the skin. Some fish are more iridescent than others, and many show very little iridescence while underwater, so I had to make the decision to paint all of the iridescent species as seen out of the water - the situation in which most humans view fish anyway. The Blacknose Dace has such fine, thin scales, that their edges are invisible, and the scales in different parts of the body are pigmented differently

Blacknose Dace Emerging (watercolour 5 x 8 in.)

Each of my reference photos showed an individual fish differently, in position and condition, as well as in angle and colour of light, so I constantly flipped through all of the photos I could find, to paint each fish as representative as possible of its species. I read about their life histories and got an almost tangible sense of their mass and shape, muscularity and texture, the stiffness or softness of their fins, the breadth of their heads, the shapes of their mouths, the details of their eyes - and gradually felt more and more a part of each species as I painted it. It was no longer "other", but as familiar to me as a family member - as Fred wrote in his song when I was painting snakes in the 1980's - "...bind another species' spirit to your own".

These three fish are the second part of my series of larger-than-life "Fish Emerging" prints on watercolour paper or stretched canvas. Contact Aleta