Orion Magazine - March-April 2008

during extensive travels through Europe and Asia. As I saw more of the world and its trout in person, a few things became clearer to me. A species like the brown trout, its native range stretching from Iceland to the Pamir Mountains of Kyrgyzstan, from the Kola Peninsula in Russia to Morocco, was highly variable. Pretty much every stream I pulled brown trout from, they looked di=erent—not only every population, but every individual. There was no way that names could account for all this diversity. Were names then inadequate in the face of our changing relationship with, and view of, nature?

Ironically, despite the beauty and diversity I had witnessed, the di=erences between the >sh I saw were not as great as I’d wished they’d been—not as great as the di=erences between the trout in my >rst book, when I accentuated characteristics that I had deemed important, based on bad photos and vague descriptions and colorful names. I was con?icted—I loved the names that had >rst led me to recognize the existence of diversity (golden trout, Oncorhynchus aguabonita; blueback trout, Salvelinus oquassa), but as I learned more I wanted to throw away the names, step beyond those constraints, in order to preserve a sense of wonder that I had felt from an early age.

Such thoughts were the origin of the curvilinear lines in my present work. For a long time I thought that my profession would be architecture, and that’s what I initially studied in

college. The >rst paintings I did with lines emanating from creatures were meant to be imaginings of what God’s or Nature’s blueprint of a particular creature might look like. After drawing curvilinear lines, >rst emanating from the points on the body of a seahorse, I realized the lines were helpful as visual aids to point out particular parts of a creature that I wanted to bring attention to. The lines activated the space around the animal in a satisfactory way, erasing the need for the name to be written beneath. In this way, the lines became a very personal visual taxonomy, replacing the lingual one.

The lines in these works are also there to acknowledge that nothing is absolute, that even the laws of physics, though tested again and again, may one day buckle in the face of some unknown force. How can we say for sure otherwise? We willingly accept the way people in the past have viewed and arranged the world. Does bowing to that authority prevent us from looking at things with a fresh perspective? Naming gives us the illusion that nature is >xed, but it is as ?uid as the language used to describe it. It is a challenge of the artist (if no one else) to un-name and re-name the world to remind us that fresh perspectives exist. a