Born and raised in San Francisco, I was always in contact with the ocean in one way or another. Little did I know that a childhood incident would inspire me to undertake a lifelong journey. I was ten, maybe nine, when one day my friend and I were heading home from the beach in the Sunset District during a striped bass run, meaning the stripers were moving south feeding on anchovies with seagulls following for the leftovers from above. This meant that lots of fishermen were following the birds in their cars, and they had all pulled over to cast their lines in the water. My friend and I spotted an unattended fishing pole being pulled into the ocean and I picked it up. The grateful fisherman knew there was a fish on it, and said it was now mine as he talked me through landing the fish. In the setting sunlight the fisherman unhooked the fish, and all we could come up with was, wow! The bass glowed with its dark green back topping a luminous mauve-tinted silver body, with black stripes running from her gills to her tail above her sparkling white belly. It was just beautiful! He helped the fish revive and then released her back into the waves.
I eventually became a surfer and started spending a lot of time on and in the ocean. Scuba diving and windsurfing followed later, as well as learning more about fish. That transitory moment when a fish is caught and leaves the water showing us its brilliant disguise always stayed with me. Paradoxically, this luminescence cannot be seen by humans underwater and rapidly fades as the fish dies out of water. Luminescence to me is magical
work on The Shoaling. Since the early 1980s when I came to NYC and opened Lucy’s, I was interested in fish art as reflected in the Lucy's logo.
Over the years I studied and learned about the plight of our over-fished rivers and oceans. Collected books on fish, fish art and read many terrific writers on the subject. But it wasn’t till a neighbor of mine fell ill and my daughter and I were making her a get-well painting out of mom’s sewing tin that I began working on fish with buttons. We constructed a fun piece of her and her husband as fish walking their dog, Pumpkin, out of hem-holders, safety pins, pins, buttons and sewing needles. My hand inspected every button in that tin box and I knew this was a “there it is” moment: buttons. Buttons, a simple universal item that is a personal part of everybody on this planet’s daily life, coming in an infinite variety of shapes, sizes and colors. Needless to say, they now became the focus of my new experiments.
Conveniently, a friend of mine had worked her whole life in the fashion business in NYC and knew of a 100-year-old button business that had recently sold in her fashion district building, and she did me the favor of connecting me with the man who owned the building. Over the course of a year, I was able to buy a lot of the button inventory that has sustained my art for almost twenty years. Imagine two floors of floor to ceiling shelves that are stacked with shoe boxes of neatly cataloged buttons in a building that you entered on 37th street and exited on 38th street. As I aquired more and more boxes of buttons, I taught myself about them, dyed them, and found different ways to build my fish with them.
At different distances, the fish appear to the viewer as paintings, and when my fish are lit up they’re luminous and meaningful in their purpose. My imagination can take flight at any time, wandering through the thoughts and concerns I have for the project on my work table in my studio. Not a day goes in which I’m not challenged by a work ethic that’s governed by: every action results in a consequence. I’m after provocation and registration. That place in our minds where images provoke and register new thoughts. I want each and every viewer of my art to see the beauty and fragility of Mother Nature’s Fish.
Taking the aesthetics of fish into a form that accomplishes what was only held in memory moves me forward with my work, but the realities of our rivers and oceans are daunting. When a sailing friend who knows the vastness of our seas says, “It is impossible to comprehend that a hundred million square miles of oceans are being over fished and dying but that’s where we’re headed,” I prefer to think there’s time to turn this around. My art brings together viewers seeing fish as they never have before and inhabitants now facing extinction – species that seek to evoke engagement through their beautiful spectacle. To stir our consciousness to be mindful of them before they’re gone.
