Tag Archives: fish art

Pun Fried Fish

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Dear Reader,

Of my calcified priorities, one is a book on horned and antlered fish that I have been working on, and off and on, for several years. I’ve written about thirty funny fish, but the art seems to ooze out of me slowly. Research has been difficult because there are very few images in my reference scrap files.

These are probably the rarest of all fish of the sea and fresh water. Most are on the verge of extinction and are almost never caught or even seen. You might say that they are the “Bigfoot” of the finned species.

Jellyfish Color Wheel

I don’t have an appropriate color wheel for this subject. This Jellyfish spectrum will have to do until I can find a visual of the “spiked jellyfish”, which are the worst of the stinging group. The background is black to enhance the 12-color, Johannes Itten, Bauhaus color wheel which is  slightly tinted, to the same degree, for maximum visual impact.

Rocky Mountain Big Horn Bass

The Rocky Mountain Bighorn Bass. 

General Custer reported that the prairie lakes teemed with the progeny of bighorn sheep and ewe-loving bass. Young ewes, drinking at the water’s edge, were overpowered by gangs of teenage bass, intent on proving their “Basshood.” Many a young ewe lost her virtue to these mouth-breathing villains.

The Rocky Mountain Bighorn Bass is the only fish that bleats as it eats. Custer’s men wore the wooly bass skins for winter coats and used the big horns to carry their pun-powder.

T.J. Bull Bass

The Tijuana Bull Bass.

Tijuana Bull Bass are known as the “Brave Bull Bass of Baja.” They bubble, snort and charge at Redfish and go loco at the sound of the Mariachi Trumpet-fish. The bull fighting pescadores battle in the Brave Bull Bass arena around Tijuana’s Cape Salsa, where the picador pescadores are suddenly unseahorsed, and barely a match for the sharp-horned Tijuana Bull Bass. The pescadors are awarded the tail, marinated in tequila and served as Bull Bass Burritos.

T.J. Bull Bass swim in singles sand bars, drink gin fins and bass beer, talk on the horn, and pick up senoritas at the spawn dance with old fish lines.

Basselope

The Bassalope.

The prairie was a big, quiet place. Out of loneliness, boredom, the desire for variety, and just something to do on a Saturday night, tender relationships developed during the millennia of mating among the fleet-footed antelope and the feisty bass.

The symbiotic result is the fast, fighting Basselope of today, now found only in a Montana river, which was named for the Basselope by Lewis and Clark. They dubbed it, the “Little Bighorn.” Bragging Basselopers who display trophy-size horns are said to be “running off at the bigmouth.”

Salmon Moose

The Salmon Moose. 

Absolutely nothing stands in the way of millions of spawning salmon surging their way upstream in Alaska’s rushing rivers. Lovely maiden moosettes, standing up to their bellies in the river rapids are savaged by crazed, testosterone-charged salmon, like sailors on shore leave. The result is the Alaskan Antlered Lox, known as Salmon Moose, a delicacy on a bagel with cream cheese.

The Salmon Moose is now quite rare because of poachers, who take the best of the early run, known on the Kenai River as “Poached Salmon Moose.”

Koi Gnu Koi Gnu

The Koi-Gnu-Koi-Gnu. 

The heavily scaled, bottom-sucking, gnu-horned carp, with a mud-ugly taste and plain grey color, was called the Congo Gnu-carp. It was hunted almost to extinction by Lionfish, but Koi keepers captured a couple and brought them to Hawaii where Koi breeders bred beautifully brilliant Koi-Gnu color combinations. In Kealakakua, Hawaii, King Kamahameha called them Koi-Gnu-Koi-Gnu. The Kealakakua Koi-Gnu-Koi-Gnu Carp Corp., is located where the prettily patterned Humuhumunukunukuapua’a goes swimming by my little grass shack in Kealakakua, Hawaii, and everyone sings, “three Kois in the fountain.”

Lake Elk

The Elked Carp

Coddled Carp are always getting “elked” in the Elkhart River. Mating carpettes moan, “elk me, elk me”, and the males elk them and they live happily ever after. Getting elked in the riffles in Elko, is known for great elking. The elked carp motto is, “Got Elk?”

Caribou Cod

Canadian Caribou Cod

The Canadian Caribou Cod were the last to lose their distinctive caribou antlers. Today, codfish cavemen would not recognize the antlered fighters that they knew so well. They would leap into the rushing water and wrestle a giant, fin dancing Canadian Caribou Cod by the antlers, hoping that they wouldn’t get the carp knocked out of them. The cod cavemen displayed Canadian Caribou Cod, mounted head, trophies in their carpal tunnel cod club.

Thanks for visiting me in my strange world…

leo

I’m not content with what I know,
only with what I can find out.

 

My exhibit is still at the Grovewood Gallery in Asheville, NC. Click here if you are interested in my collage classes. New classes are being added for January and February.

Prices for these fish are: Bassalope, Koi Gnu, are $1000…TJ Bull Bass, Elked Cod, Caribou Carp, are $1500… Rocky Mountain Big Horn Bass is reduced to $2800 from $3200 because of a nick on the corner of the frame. The size of this one is 39×23″.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Spinning Fish

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Dear Reader,

As an illustrator, I did many fish, and fishing-related assignments. I have a series of horned and antlered fish underway, hopefully enough for a thin slice of baloney we know as the humorous fishing gift book. I searched through my color wheel images and nothing seemed to fit this category, so I cut this new one. It isn’t a traditional wheel, but it seemed like a cool idea to me.

Spinning Fish

This “spinning fish” image (took awhile to cut the damn thing) gave me the opportunity to paint the full spectrum with one fish in warm hues and the other in cool. The colors start at the top fish with yellow and go through yellow orange, orange, red orange, red, and red violet. That last color transitions into the tail of the second fish, which starts as violet, then goes to blue violet, blue, blue green, green, and yellow green. That last color transitions into the yellow of the first fish. Skeletal and scale structure simplify the image.

In the late 80’s I began making paper sculpture fishing flies. I showed the first one at the Peppertree Art Show in the Santa Ynez Valley in California. It was 30 x 40” with three flies, each about 30” long. Big, big, really big flies.

The show was Western Americana. One old guy didn’t think that the flies were Western art and kept coming by, scowling and muttering. It wasn’t a cowboy with a horse and dog near a campfire, so it just wasn’t art.

He came up and snarled, “What kind of fish do you catch with those?” I didn’t miss a beat and replied, “Suckers!” I just couldn’t help myself. He loved the humor, but he still didn’t like the art.

Several years ago, the Museum of Idaho asked if I could make 30 flies, in 60 days, for an outdoor sports exhibition. No. Not just no, but absolutely NO! Then make as many as you can, they said, and in 60 days I made 20 flies and wrote 20 traditional, 17-syllable haiku poems to go with them. I’ve been writing haiku for about 45 years. Here are two of the flies with the poems:

Lost Sinner

Riffles and ripples
Clear creek cradles dancing leaf.
Good fishing, no bites. 

The Big Liar

Trout awake hung
And hear the glacier move.
Unlucky May fly.

These flies weren’t made for this blog, so the color analysis is after the fact.The top fly is made up of hot reds, pinks, yellow and rust, with a small amount of blues as subordinate accents. Those accents harmonize with the background’s variation of blues and greens, from dark to medium value and from intense (bright) to neutral shades.

Triple Flies

Snow months I tie flies
I dream about them at night.
Three left on my hat.

On a mottled neutral green background, I staged three similar flies with blue as the dominant hue and hot reds and white, in subordinate proportions, as the accents. This piece is 20 x 40.” My flies are abstract art with a hook on it. Everything is cut from white paper, even the hooks, and painted and assembled.

Oddly enough, my best customers for the flies are women, who buy them for their
fly-fishing husbands or boyfriends. That way they don’t get something the guys already have, or buy the wrong thing. When you gift fly-fishing gear, too often you hear, “What in hell did you buy that thing for?” Play it safe, select one of my flies. They’re probably cheaper than anything in fly-fishing stores.

In 1937, we were in the depths of the Great Depression. I was going to be five in two weeks. The family was spending Christmas with my grandparents and my Uncle Bud and Aunt Alberta, in Keystone, near Mount Rushmore. Money was scarce and so were the gifts. Uncle Bud was a fly-fisher, and there was a trout stream running through their back yard. Aunt Alberta traded house cleaning for six hand-tied flies from a neighbor down the crick.

She laid them on a cotton pad in a small box, which she gift-wrapped, and lovingly gave to Uncle Bud. He was delighted to say the least, and he showed them to me and said that they were for fish. Later in the day, he was looking for the flies and asked me if I had seen them. I said that I had given them to the fish. He asked what I meant. I told him that I had gone out on the foot-bridge, and tossed them into the crick, one at a time. I was his only nephew so he didn’t kill me. But I kept out of Alberta’s way for a while.

Thanks for visiting me…

leo

“Spinning Fish,” a color wheel, is available at $1,000.  20 x 20”
“Triple Flies” is available at $3,000. 20 x 40” (plexiglas shadow box)
Other flies are available.  Thanks for your interest.

I am in the Weaverville Art Safari open studios tour on May 12 & 13.
See the website at http://weavervilleartsafari.com/ for information.