 I hope you're in the right place, and not part of the museum director's crowd, but this is the MSU Library's Trout and Salmonet lecture. So I hope you're all in the right place. This lecture series is fairly young, but has had an interesting history, and is part of our Bud Lilly Trout and Salmonet initiative at MSU Libraries. We've had a medieval historian tracing the early days of the very first days of flying fishing in Europe. We've had Dr. Bob Baby talking about native species cutthroat, west-slope cutthroat trout. And tonight we have something entirely different for you. So I hope each one of these lectures will bring some new facet to bear on our Cutthroat and Salmonet interest here. We do offer this lecture series free and open to the public due to the generosity of a number of individuals, and we thank them. We also have to recognize that Bud Lilly is with us tonight. And the collection that he advocates so strongly is contrary to the information in your program, has exceeded 10,000 volumes as of last summer and continues to grow with a number of important and impressive manuscript claims as well. So I encourage all of you, of course, to come and visit the library. This evening's lecture will be followed by a reception and a book signing, and a lot of them came through. And this event, like any good event, every good event, involves the hard work of great many people. And I'd like to briefly thank these are most of the larger people. Jane Snow, Robin Francis, Jane Howard, Michael Hodges, Jim Scott, and those of you who go up to Special Clutches may know him. And the newest member of our team, Angela Tate. But most especially, I want to thank Paul Schulich. Many of you know Paul as a noted historian and an author. And we are on a big stake, not another role, and serves as our scholar-residence, assisting us on the Manhattan State University Library with our Yellowstone collection, our Grout Salmon collection, and in many other German rules. So I am going to invite Paul to the podium to introduce our speaker for this evening. Thank you. Is that sound okay? It's hard to tell from behind. It's really intriguing to be here to be involved in this wonderful lecture series. In the Grout Salmon collection initiative, it's a fantastic collection. I'm very proud of it. In fact, for the last year up in the Special Collection's reading room, where to go to enjoy this collection, we've had a terrific exhibit of angling books that display through dozens of lines, beautifully illustrated lines, representing the last five centuries of fishing and fishing war, that traces the concurrent development of the craft of flight time, the science of entomology, and the technology of printing. It's one of the many exciting benefits of having this world-class Grout Salmon collection here at MSU. So for its sort of internal values, it's a swell exhibit, but it has bigger messages. One of them is that trout and trout fishing really are part of a much larger world historically. The Grout and Salmon collection in many ways reflects and informs our understanding of an ever-changing human society, and some of its most urgent conversations. It really is a part of human culture if you look at it in its full variety. Another message is that there's really no clear line between fishing, art, and every other kind of art. In the history of American art, for example, the sporting scenes of people as diverse as Arthur Fitzwilliam Tate, Winslow Omer, Carl Ramius, and Arden Pleissner, have brilliantly conveyed the many layers of majors, paintings, joys, and beauty. This isn't just about fishing. And tonight we celebrate a rarefied art of this artistic tradition, the domain of the literary artists, those multi-talented souls who combine their own words and images to tell a broader and deeper story than either words or images alone could tell. From Beewitt to Audubon to Sibley, the literary artists have empowered our celebrations of the wonders of nature. And I suspect there are probably a few fishermen here tonight. Fishermen have a really rich legacy of literary artists. For example, Lee Wolfe, perhaps the most innovative fly-fisher in American history, only drifted into a career in fishing after studying art in Paris in the 1920s. Preston Jennings, the author of our first important American angling entomology in 1935, became a passionate artist the better to probe the sub-effects of sub-aquatic light on imitative fly patterns. And more recently, Ernest Schwiebert and Dave Whitlock, two strikingly different literary and artistic voices, did much to define not only the interests, but the actual tastes of the modern fly-fisher. Now I've chosen, as you've noticed so far, to depart from the time-honored and fundamentally boring approach of just repeating to you what your program has already told you about our speaker tonight. Because I want to emphasize that we're here tonight to meet the rightful heir of this grand tradition of the literary arts. James Prozac has established himself as a writer and artist of international stature. When we open one of his books, we embark with him on adventures that clarify and test our vision of wild nature and of the values and aesthetics that we bring to the natural world. That said, we have encouraged James to range beyond the trout in the title of his talk and share with you the story of how his original passion for trout has grown into this much broader and more ambitious literary and artistic enterprise. With that, please welcome James Prozac. Hi everybody. I left my clicker in my bag. I guess I can hit the button. Or I could run up and get my clicker if you don't mind. Let me run it with my clicker. Hello. You can hear me up here. Can you still hear me? It's a clicker bag. There it is. Still with me in there? Oh, sure. Okay. I'm happy to be here and grateful for the trout in Salmone collection and Montana State University for having me out all the way from south western Connecticut where I live in a town called Easton. Thank you, Paul. That was a beautiful preamble introduction. Thank you, Bud, who I fished with a couple years ago out here and any other friends in the audience and people I spent time with earlier today and tomorrow and everybody and hopefully I'll get a chance to talk to you guys during the reception. I'm going to take a look at the time so I don't talk too long. But as Paul said, I'm going to kind of start with my interest in trout because this is the trout in Salmone collection lecture but then sort of talk a little bit about what I've been working on more recently which is informed by my early love of trout which was, I don't know how to quite describe it, but some of you I'm sure have felt this feeling of total obsession for a creature but I, from about 9 to 28, I'm 36 now, I would say that trout pretty much consumed my brain activity more than anything else. So anyway, this is a painting, it's not a trout, something you've never recognized. But this is about life size of this painting, maybe it might be a little, the actual painting might be a little smaller, but it's close to life size. It's a swordfish that I saw harpooned off in Nova Scotia. I'm doing a project right now where I'm painting about 40 Atlantic fishes. It'll be a book, but unfortunately the book won't be that big. But I'm going to be exhibiting them in a spotlight. I'll be exhibiting, can you guys see the image okay? I'll be exhibiting them in a couple of different places over the next two years, the National Academy of Sciences and D.C.D. Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the Addison Gallery of American Art which is Massachusetts all East Coast, unfortunately. Maybe we'll try to travel in some other places. But the idea is I'm not painting a fish to represent a species in a field guide. I have some issues with the whole idea of species and the species concept, but I'm painting an individual fish that I had a personal experience with. So as I said, this particular swordfish I saw harpooned on George's bank off Nova Scotia. And it had this particular X-shaped mark near the gill plate. So I painted that in and it's very much, these paintings for me are very much about the experience of being there with the fish. So they're experience driven pictures and if I see myself reflected in the fish I'll paint a little bit of that in there. In this particular fish I'll post you can see me leaning over the fish in the eyeball. But it's about the predatory relationship with the fish and I'm painting it not underwater in its environment, but at the moment that it leaves its element of water and comes into ours the air. And anybody who's caught fish before trout, but especially these large oceanic pelagic fishes, they're grown in the oceans. When they first come out of the water they're pulsing with color and light and almost like they're lit from some internal source. But they're not only flickering with their own internal light and Marlon Fisherman will often talk about them being lit up. But they're basically swimming mirrors reflecting the world around them. So everything in the environment around them is reflecting back at you in some abstract form. So for an artist I really enjoy that challenge of trying to capture that moment which is just a moment you can't really paint a fish. It's a dynamic constantly changing thing. Any painting of a fish is just an interpretation. So these are my interpretations, but I also wanted to paint them life-size so people would have some idea of the monumentality of these fish that we were losing. Especially like a bluefin tuna, it's just an amazing fish. And for me one of the best ways to see some of the bigger fish was on harpoon boats because they actually stalk the fish and they throw a spear at the fish and it's pretty amazing. But anyway, maybe the clicker doesn't work. This is a sailfish, but I'll start more at the beginning with my interest in trout and then I'll try to explain some of this other stuff. This is James probably, I don't know, 14 years old. I went to a camp in the Tetons called Teton Valley Ranch Camp and that was my first exposure to the West, my first trip on an airplane. It was a really, really formative experience. And this was an introduced brook trout into some high mountain lake in Wyoming. A Connecticut trout that followed me out of the West. But I was introduced to nature as a child through my father's love of birds. He grew up in Brazil and when he moved to this country, when he was around 14 years old, he brought that love of birds with him and his brother used to catch live birds and traps and keep them in a cage on the brand of their home. I originally moved to Neera Shell, New York and then went to Fort Skylar Maritime Academy on the East River and sailed the Merchant Marine. He always told me that I should travel while I'm young because he had an opportunity to travel while he was young and don't wait until you're retired to travel. So I sort of took that to heart a little bit. But he introduced me to birds and eventually we moved to Connecticut while I was born in Connecticut and grew up in the same town where I live now. Easton, I lived two houses down from the house where I grew up. So he took me on the walk, went in the woods looking for birds and identifying birds and he used to bring home vines of Audubon's paintings of the birds of North America home from the local library and I'd sit at the kitchen table and copy them over and over. At that point I hadn't seen Audubon's original paintings where in the Elton folio were life-sized birds painted on the biggest pieces of paper he could find and the birds with long necks and stuff presented some compositional challenges so he had to crank their necks around and some of them cranked like contorted compositions but they're incredible paintings and as a kid and I don't think Audubon's given as much credit as he should as an artist and not just a painter of birds but as a kid I would sit at the kitchen table and copy these paintings over and over and my first paintings were of birds and then around the age of nine a friend of mine at school a real troublemaker named Stephen Bartlett started taking the fishing and it was kind of a transitional time in my life because my mother had just left home and some of the places I walked in the woods with my father and mother were sort of temporarily poisoned so I've been searching for new mediums to play in and so this new watery medium opened up to me and we fished for a large amount of bass and poached and there's like four drinking water reservoirs in my town in Easton and there's a lot of open watershed land around the reservoirs thousands of acres so it's kind of this mini wilderness area even though it's about 50 miles from New York City and so we had a lot of fun fishing illegally in these reservoirs and fishing illegally is always more fun but and he took me, I remember one, it was February and it just snowed and he took, we walked from his house through the woods to this little stream probably 11 years old at that point this little stream that came in the north end of the Easton reservoir where there's native brook trout and I caught my first native brook trout and I couldn't believe the colors on this fish just like a tropical fish living in this small really dark steeped, you know, with a tannic colored teak stain kind of creek and, you know, blue spots with, or red spots with blue halos and orange bellies, you guys know what I'm talking about and I just completely fell in love with this fish and started painting them and I went to the library looking for a book on trout a kutlan took what Audubon had done for birds assembling them all and I couldn't find one so at 11 years old I thought well I'm going to make the book on the trout in North America and this was before the internet well it's hard to believe so I guess kids do other things now besides paying trout but I was writing like handwritten letters at 12, 13 to departments of wildlife around the country in states where I thought there must be trout Colorado, Wyoming and what I found was that there were particular people that sometimes studied an individual type of trout for years on bold cutthroat or, you know, whatever and they were very nice sending responses to this kid who was interested in painting them and sometimes photographs and so I started collecting assembling a list of all the fish that I could find based on the names of the trout and I found some old books in secondhand bookstores one important book was American Food and Game Fishers by David Star Jordan and Walter Everman or Walter Everman or whatever his name was but Jordan was the first president of Stanford University and a really interesting guy and I became fascinated with these characters who had discovered and named some of these different trout and at 16 years old when I got a driver's license I started in summers trying to drive around and look for some of these native trout and there was a particular landlocked Arctic Char that lived in some lakes in Maine and that was within driving distance so my friend and I drove up to the Red River Lakes in northern Maine to try to catch a blueback trout which is really just a landlocked Arctic Char but we just thought it was the holy grail of everything and so we, it was just like amazing the intensity with which I loved these fish amazing to me in retrospect anyway so I started assembling a list and by the time I was a freshman in college I had about paintings of maybe 70 different types of trout and I sent out 10 proposals blindly to 10 publishers that was rejected from 9 of them and found a publisher, Alfred Knopf of the Division of Random, has to do this book which I was talking a little bit earlier today but it was kind of miraculous because Random House gets like 50,000 unsolicited manuscripts a year and the editor who happened to pick up the book had grown up in eastern Oregon on a mink farm and was a fly fisherman so someone there must have known him like trout and his name is Gary Fisker-John he's also a very important fiction editor he's a poor mechanical cartoon Richard Ford he's been to me with a new smoking unfiltered camel cigarette in his office in New York and anyway the book eventually came out my junior year in college and at the time I was studying to become an architect but my father always said I need to have some kind of profession because artists start and you can't be an artist for a living so what the book did was I thought well maybe I'll keep trying to write books and paint pictures so that's what I've kind of been doing ever since and doing the same thing I've been doing since I was five years old and so then I wrote some other books my second book was called Joe and Me about my friendship with a game warden named Joe Haines who caught me fishing illegally in one of the reservoirs when I was about 14 and Joe became a really important outdoor mentor teaching me about coming and fishing and ice fishing and mushroom hunting and then I did a book about Isaac Walton I got a travel fellowship at Yale for my senior thesis to travel in Isaac Walton's footsteps and then I guess on the title of this lecture it talks about a project I did called Flat Fishing in 41st Parallel where I traveled the latitude and line of my home around the world looking for native trout which was the idea of an editor at Harper Kahn's that I did a complete angler book with a totally harebrained idea and he'd been thinking of sending an author on a trip cooking on the latitude line or doing something so he said how would you like to fish around a latitude line and I said oh that sounds like a fun thing to do and so I chose a latitude line of my home 41 degrees north when I went in the straight line east around which happens to be in the middle of native trout territory maybe I should show some more slides coincidentally my address growing up in southwestern Connecticut is 41catchel street the same number as the latitude line just, you know, here to numerology or something it also adds up to 5 not this as a pointer, I don't think so but that red line there is roughly the 41st Parallel I guess up here we're probably 48 or 50 degrees 45, okay not that high then so it was a good excuse for me though to continue my trout researches because trout are only north of native to the northern hemisphere I mean trout is kind of an arbitrary term because it, maybe I'll get into that later but it's kind of a in the middle of my trout researches as a kid in the late 80s I guess they reclassified the trouts based on genetic work so the rainbow trout used to be in the genus Salmo I'm not really into all these Linnean hierarchies you know the Linnean system distills everything down to a genus and species like Homo sapien, Salmo truta for the brown trout but the brown trout which was thought to have been related to the rainbow trout was reclassified with the Atlantic salmon and the rainbow trout was classified with the Pacific salmon and the burp trout, my native trout was actually most closely related to the Arctic char so what people used to think were trout which are especially with a similar profile that trouty looking profile with the squarish dorsal fin and the adipose fin actually aren't that closely related so in the middle of my making this book on trout the first book of the trout of North America I kind of came to this conundrum like well what do I include it a Sakai salmon is actually more closely related to a rainbow trout than it is to a brown trout but I don't like Sakai salmon because they look ugly so should I include it so it was totally arbitrary the decisions I made as far as what to include or not include but I based all the paintings on fish that had been named by reputable biologists but I also learned very quickly that people couldn't agree on how many trout there were or take two species like the rainbow trout and the cutthroat trout technically species aren't supposed to breed in the wild and create fertile offspring yet there are places where rainbow trout and cutthroat trout ranges overlap the native places naturally then create fertile hybrids so the whole species thing sort of started to lose a little steam with me and things began to get a little fuzzier at the edges but still I had to have these fish in a book enough to make a book but I realized that I could have painted 300 trout for this book and they would all be pretty different but I just did 70 because I had a deadline but anyway so trout I think the southern most native salmoned fish is in Taiwan it's a Pacific landlocked Pacific salmon that's around 28 degrees north close to the Mexican native trout but anyway the northern hemisphere is pretty much it but for one of the fish that I had wanted to paint in this book on the trout of Europe and Asia in North Africa it has a huge native range it's native from Iceland all the way to the Pamir Mountains in Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan and South Africa in the Alice Mountains in Morocco and that's the brown trout which is a pretty awful name for a beautiful fish but anyway in the course of doing the research for this book I realized that painting all the diversity of the fish that I saw into one or fitting it all into one species name for this really rich beautiful fish that lived in this vast native range of fish and streams in Sardinia and in the Mediterranean Sea in this island where there were brown trout feeding in 83 degree water but it adapted to these desert streams and then these other trout in the Balkans that only lived in the first 300 yards of a spring-fed creek because they'd adapted to that particular part of the stream and they had a specialized mad shape for feeding on the bottom of these softmouth trout I just felt like it was to lump all this stuff into one species name because if someone came in from the outside and said oh that's just a brown trout you could dismiss the whole the whole black so I became very suspicious of classification and taxonomy anyway more pictures my primary travel companion on my travels in the 41st parallel was a guy named Johannes Schruppman a baker by profession who lived in southern Austria he's the most knowledgeable person in the world on native brown trout he's seen more native brown trout in their native habitat than anybody in the world I'm pretty sure of that from Spain to Kyrgyzstan Norway and Morocco and he's provided tissue samples to in particular this guy, Louis Bernache a biologist at La Valley University in Quebec who's doing, trying to create a genetic map of all the brown trout but I've written Robert Benke who a former speaker here of this lecture series, some of you know Bob he's kind of the mother of trout research people the granddaddy of trout biology and I've written him when I was in college to ask if he knew anybody who caught trout on the headboards of the Tigers and Euphranies because I wanted to go look for trout in Europe and Asia and I was applying for a travel fellowship before I got the the little grant to go in the footsteps of Isaac Wall and I first applied to go look for trout in the the headboards of the Tigers and Euphranies because I had read in Elton's Paradise the loss of the Tigers bubbles forth in the Tree of Life in the Garden of Eden and I thought well go look for trout in Eden in Paradise and the trout of course survived the flood because God must have favored the fish if he chose a fate for land animals that wouldn't kill the fish because I don't think Noah had fish tanks on the ark so it was kind of a boondoggle idea and they didn't approve it but Benke said he knew of one person who fished for trout or had caught native trout in the headboards of the Euphranies and it was this guy, this businessman named Johannes Schuffman and he'd never met him or anything and I was in Europe and I took a 17 hour train ride to southern Austria to the little village where this guy lived and met him and he said he put me up in his house which I, that's when I realized he was a baker because he lived on the second floor above a bakery several generations baker in this little Austrian town and the next day he took me, he and myself and his wife drove over the mountain to buy from southern Austria into Slovenia and we pulled up by the banks of this beautiful stream called the Socha some of you may have been there it's an emerald colored river and we parked next to this big sign of it there was a fish with an X over it the universal sign for no fishing so that means of course there's good fishing there so I started stringing out my fly rod and Johannes said no, leave your fly rod and he proceeded to put on a full body wetsuit and jump in the river and the man made net so he made this net that tapers down to a point and so when he gets a fish to swim into the net thinking maybe it's cover or something it just gets its head stuck in the net and it can't turn around and come out so he's not an angler but he is obsessed with in the sense that he uses a rod that bends in an angle but he he loves trout so some people ask how did I find trout in Europe and Asia and I said I just looked for the signs this is if you can't read Armenian that says Isham which in Armenian they call the trout the Prince Fish and this is on the border of Slovenia and Austria is a trout and it says fly club so that's easy that one says truchess and Spanish trout so that's easy this one says pasrafa that's in Croatia and I can't read Japanese but I know that's a trout so I know there must be a trout somewhere around there so I figured out that if I learn the word for trout in Turkish it's alabolic in German it's in Russian in Kurdish it's if you learn the word for trout for beer you're pretty good to go and this is a beautiful headwater stream on the top of the Tiber's river so I did make it there with Johannes this is part of the 41st parallel travels and we caught some trout there we actually drove from Austria to northern Italy took a ferry to Greece drove through Greece into Turkey all the way to the Iraqi border and back up through Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia in the late 90s and there was still fighting going on the Balkans so it was a little dicey but some of that stuff in my book so this is a trap from the headwars of the Tiber's river which we didn't get on that trip because we couldn't get into the tributaries we wanted to because there was active fighting between the Kurdish people and the Turkish military and they wouldn't let us go to certain places and it just became so impossible to go anywhere because of all these military checkpoints that we gave up but Johannes went back a couple years later and caught a few specimens and these are probably the first color photographs of the Tiber's trout it's kind of a cool fish to have a big adipose fin and the Tiber's and the Euphrates were so interesting to Johannes for brown trout because they're the only streams in the region that flow to the Persian Gulf and there were never any trout I guess that goes to the Indian Ocean or whatever there were never trout anywhere around there so these fish crossed over from headwaters from the Caspian Sea the Mediterranean and maybe even the Black Sea drainage because the headwars of the Tiber's Euphrates go almost to the headwaters to mountain passes where the headwaters from other drainage come so at certain periods they were able to cross over so these fish are kind of hybrids between brown trout from other drainages Turkey's really interesting for native brown trout evolution and the Balkans but Turkey in particular because they have been isolated in these four distinct drainages the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea the Mediterranean and then the Tiber's Euphrates which go to the Persian Gulf this is a native trout and it's called the Ishan Prince Fish those beautiful big black spots I just really was into the physical diversity of the fish this is one of those soft-mouthed trout this one's from a river in Croatia you can see it has that sort of grayling-like mouth but it's genetically most closely related to brown trout they call it locally the Zloost Pastrafa the evil-mouthed trout these are some little native trout from Japan and Hokkaido that look very much like reminded me of my native brown trout at home that's a camel I'm not sure how I got in there that's a Mongolian rental car this is a very peculiar trout that was discovered by a guy named Igor Cheresna in a lake called El Gugidgin Lake in north-eastern Russia, Chukoka and the lake apparently only goes ice-free once every six years or something and they caught these big predatory char in the mouths of these little creeks that were where there was warmer water with the big to digest their food more easily and in the stomachs they found this very peculiar looking char-like fish so then they dropped the gill nets down to about 400 feet and they caught these things that were classified as a separate a new genus of salmon and fish that are called finus whatever sorry these are just different reproductively isolated populations of Arctic char from the same lake in the region of Lake Baikal not Lake Baikal but it's just fascinating how you had all this variety even within the same lake reproductively isolated populations that look so different and I started to wonder how do you describe all this diversity a simple, you know, lenain system taxonomic system isn't enough this is a Mongolian boy with a gray link this is a I thought I'd throw this in since Robert Benke is such an important part of the trout world it was so important in my research but this is Benke and his former office at Colorado State University very tidy I started sending him letters when I was probably 12 or 13 years old and he responded to them so that was really nice of him to do and without him and all his work I would never have been able to do any of the trout work that I did because he just introduced me to people or at least told me where they were so I could seek them out I can be very persistent but anyway I love that office and his specimen room was even neater oh that's just the dead cutthroat trout you guys have probably seen that before I was a Labrador dog and then these are some of the paintings I did which this is called the Marvel trout that lives in Slovenia they're just I never was pretending that these look like the actual fish but they're just my renditions of the fish maybe they resemble something but looking back on it the first book of trout I did which was published in 1996 the one on the Trout of North America is largely a work of imagination because I was painting those things from descriptions in old books some of them had been extinct for a long time and I just had very scant information I've only seen like a handful of them myself so I made a lot of stuff up in that book but it's really just a record of an intense child of passion but I like that it's probably more imagination than real and I've become interested in a particular period of time when this kind of stuff was going on a lot and in northern Europe in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries when merchant ships were going abroad and bringing specimens back from different places the artists in northern Europe never saw these things in life they were just painting them from flash skins and pelts and stuff and I'll show some images of these things like when Albert Durr drew the first rhinoceros he hadn't even seen one it was just from descriptions of a rhinoceros that was headed to Lisbon but the drawing is so fantastic and fantastical that it didn't really matter to me anymore about accuracy it was more about just kind of thinking about our relationship to fishes and whatever I don't really think accuracy is possible we can reach some level of accuracy but after that anything we tried to do is just kind of an illusion in my mind but this is a native char in Japan Miyabe Iwana and I started thinking about the history of depicting stuff and nature by humans why do we do it why draw something that we see what's the point when I would draw a trout as a kid when I was intensely into fly fishing if I drew a work trout the entire experience of being on the stream and catching that fish flooded back into my head it was such a weird experience and whenever I've been out in the field and drawn a flower or landscape actually sitting there I remember that hour however long I was there so intimately so much different than just snapping a photograph and moving on and whenever I look at photos from a trip they just completely pale they might bring back help bring back some memories of the experience but they're just to me just really pale representations of a rich life experience but I think my personal opinion about these are cave paintings in Glasgow, France or Chauvet or one of those caves why these people did this 30,000 years ago I think that drawing the things that you are pursuing was a big part of becoming a successful predator because by drawing something you really have to learn the anatomy the articulation and the muscles and so they would be able to internalize being there in the field looking at the thing and I think drawing helped them become more efficient predators and with having to predate to kill things in order to survive I don't think humans ever enjoyed killing things some psychopaths might but outside of that I think there was always some level of regret having to kill things and so I think everything really comes out of the predatory process but I think that we fly fish we draw we do everything because we kill things as humans this is just a picture of Dutch shipbuilding Holland, Amsterdam 18th century maybe but it was because of the technology to go abroad that all this stuff the diversity of the traffic was so much greater than what anybody had seen in Europe and before people started going abroad people only needed to know the names of a handful of things in their local area that were important to them but once all this stuff started flooding in from the traffic they needed some system to organize it all and that's when Carl Linnea stepped up in 1935 and created this hierarchical system of classification not all of the upper ranks of the hierarchy were in place during his lifetime but you know the kingdom, class, phylum all that thing down the genus and species which I've become very interested in critiquing and I think that at some point we'll lose at least the upper ranks of the hierarchy it's just an oversimplification of nature but it was necessary at the time this is Der's drawing that I described before he'd never seen one before it's pretty remarkable I love these drawings what the heck is that it looks like flying buttresses coming off the side of the... it's architecturally interesting maybe even more interesting than a real rhinoceros I mean the human imagination is just incredible the first skins of birds of paradise to come back from New Guinea didn't have feet probably because the locals skinned them and took the feet off to put in the end-dresses so the northern Europeans imagined that birds of paradise didn't have feet and never landed that's why they called them birds of paradise and that they just like pooped out nagging the male and female juggled it like a hot potato until it hatched these have feet because this is a later drawing but there's drawings of I should try to find one of the male and female juggling meag back and forth but when Linnaeus came around to naming the bird of paradise he named it Apoda without feet and then there were instances I'm interested in the history of natural history painting and how we've drawn nature there was a great show at the Yale Center for British Art there was a series of seaweed done by Indian artists, anonymous Indian artists that were either commissioned by British imperial people colonials or they were doing it as forced labor but these Indian artists have been trained in the Southeast Asian miniature tradition some of these paintings are so meticulous they had to use single-hair brushes to paint them but given this task of painting something like seaweed you take out of the water it's like wet hair it's not what do you do with seaweed but because geometry was so much a part of the paintings they composed them in such interesting ways this is just the strand of seaweed but when these paintings came back to Britain they influenced the history of natural history painting from that time forward but the exhibition was called Ocean Flowers this painting was done by a woman named Maria Civilamarian one of the few women to go on that sort of expedition to New World South America in the 17th century she went with her daughter in 1699 from Holland to Suriname which was a former Dutch colony up until a few years ago now it's independent north of Brazil I have pictures of it I'm gonna have to step it up anyway this is the largest moth this moth has the largest wingspan in the world and this caterpillar happens to be incorrect they don't know the caterpillar of this moth but I will talk more about it but I'm afraid I should look faster this is what they call the Cabinet of Curiosity or Wunderkammer these early collections by merchants of stuff they brought back from the New World and overseas and they dissembled them in ways that they just felt like it to impress their friends but these collections eventually became our museums of natural history and so forth this is one of my favorite dioramas in the Museum of Natural History that background is painted by my name is James Perry Wilson incredible paintings so in my interest in naming and ordering nature I've begun to critique the institution that does that which is the Natural History Museum so I started doing when I finished the second book of Trout of the World with all these thoughts in my head about how you know, species and naming and ordering nature I wanted to say a little bit more about what I was thinking about our relationship to nature so I started doing these stupid hybrid creatures that were creatures that became their names in protest of being named there's a reef fish called a parrotfish that has a mouth that's, you know, hard to crunch and quarrel when you've seen parrotfish so whoever saw that is called a parrotfish because the mouth looked like a parrot beak so I painted a literal parrotfish that as I said had become its name because it didn't want to be controlled by language this is a turtle down and these are just the tools of the collector and so on and the history of the expedition was this is a duck trap I don't think there's anything called a duck trap I just wanted a few of the wood duck and a perp trap because I like them this is a sailfish that I painted just a large some of them have been baked this one's about ten feet long and then I started doing these pictures of actual creatures with lines around them and in traditional Natural History painting there's a common scientific name of the creature under it to the audience it's like okay that's what it is it's a Siberian tiger or it's a this or it's a that but I didn't want people to be held back by having to know what it is and just look at the thing and not have to identify it we're so identification driven that's why Field Guide Revolution has been so all consuming and I could go on and on I started doing these pictures where I drew these curvilinear lines to replace the names which are my personal expression of the aura the thing or the space that I occupied an acknowledgement that the space between things is just as important that we can't see is just as important as the object itself the ecosystem you know for conservationists you take one thing out of the equation and it all falls apart or it has to change it's just totally constant I also like lines so drawing lines just drew lines around them and then I did some this is a mural I did in an exhibition of a place called Aldrich Contemporary Museum in Connecticut and these are blown up versions I painted on the walls of the end papers of Roger Torrey Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds where there's these silhouettes and you're supposed to identify the bird and match it up to the name but I left the names out because I didn't want anybody to be able to identify them and then I did although I think of all the work that Peterson did I think that is the best picture that he ever composed I like his drawings of the birds the birds and the environments it's such a gorgeous composition and that's just a copy you know, end papers, blown up these are some of the flying birds I just painted on the wall and then I started doing these what I call tool creatures this is a cockatoo that has a headdress Swiss Army knife and it's sort of a commentary on how in conservation we only tend to want to protect what's useful to us so these creatures have evolved to mimic human industry in order to survive kind of like in the Flintstones I think there's like some broom birds and stuff and this is a drill duck made some holes in the log there and then I started making actual environments that you know, because in the Natural History Museum the specimen is the proof of the existence of the thing so I started making the real thing so people would say oh wow that's a drill duck but this and I've had people actually go up to it and say is there a bird with a beak like that? they said yes that's a flying sea horse see Peggy says I think those are real that's a flying fox it's a sleeping fox that has wings on it that's in an exhibition I have up right now at Fairfield University which is a local university that's the painting of a flying fox somebody shot it it's a dead flying fox but I also became interested in the fact that in order to name something it's kind of absurd the whole naming thing I think in order to name something we have to kill it so there's a real big element of possession and control in the whole naming process when you name a pet you're basically taking possession over it and more about that later these are some of the ocean fish been painting for this book this is my closest and nearest and nearest Natural History Museum the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Gale University in New Haven, Connecticut and I grew up going to this museum and I loved the Natural History Museum the dioramas, the birds all stopped and orderly lined up that mural up there was painted by a guy I don't remember his name but it's an incredible mural it's totally inaccurate now I'm sure Jack Warner would have a heart attack but it's a beautiful work of art it took the guy years can't remember his name I'll remember it later anyway this is Adam and Eve just to illustrate how ingrained the naming process is in human existence Adam's the first task for the first human a garden is to take possession of everything through naming and there's a great story by Ursula the Gwynn science fiction writer mostly called she unnames them where Eve goes through the garden unnaming everything Adam names and when she's done she hands her name back to Adam and walks out of the garden so I became kind of embedded in the natural history of the museum later after I graduated I became a curatorial affiliate I started volunteering at the museum I learned how to skin and prepare birds and things like that and I learned that they actually still go on collecting trips to far off places so I always wanted to do stuff like that I think if I lived in the 19th century I would have wanted to be professional collector I don't really like the killing part that much having like collecting stuff and looking at it especially natural stuff so I learned all these skills skinning birds and stuff so I could go on a collecting trip at the Peabody Museum so after years of trying to get on with these trips in spring of 2010 I went to Suriname this former Dutch colony north of Brazil to watch the naming process first hand so the main objective of the trip is to look for undescribed species and name them and we found one new bird species on this trip but what I learned very quickly is that a collecting trip involves a lot of killing and so we helicoptered into this remote part of Central Suriname so remote that the mountains don't have names, the rivers don't have names it's a totally nameless region and I also learned that if humans haven't been there there's no names there's just no the mice aren't going to name it so they don't even have an official map of Suriname, they're still disputing borders with the other Guyamas and with Brazil but this area is part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site called the Central Suriname Nature Preserve but almost nobody's ever been in this region because it's so hard to get to Suriname is here north of Brazil I've never heard of it, I thought it was in Africa before I went there and then the Central Suriname Nature Preserve was in the middle I think I'm in about 42 minutes of speaking should I speak for another 5? so this we helicoptered into this place and saw a lot of cool stuff this is a little, it's actually a toad that my friend Christophe who led this trip, the Ornithology Collections Manager at the Peabody Museum said that he calls it a semaphore frog because they live in these streams that have such raging torrents and cascades that the frogs can't hear each other calling so they wave to each other it's like that Panamanian golden frog is related to this sexual toad but he can see some things on YouTube so we killed some snakes and orchids and I collected moths I got to see the big moth, the white witch moth one of my pet projects is to try to find the caterpillar that big moth that was about 10 inches across snakes and dead snakes painting snakes doing stuff in the work tent while we would collect birds in the morning and then spend 5-6 hours skinning them and preparing them the rest of the day and while we were in the work tent there was a Christoph the guy on the right I don't know if any of you are familiar with the writer he's a great writer natural history writer but Christoph heard this yellow cheap toucanette in the trees so he grabbed his iPod and he has a little speaker so he played a toucanette column the poor thing came careening out of the forest and the bird shot it but what I also learned is that birds like fish the colors and birds typically too and Audubon actually described he said in his writings that 75% of birds colors disappear in the first 18 hours after the thing is dead even from the feathers but certainly the tissue around the eye all those brilliant turquoisey colors are gone the color on the beak fades pretty remarkable and then I just have a couple more slides that show some of the trips I've taken to look for these ocean fish because I'm painting all these big ocean fish from fish that I actually saw so harpooning is a really good way to see a fish in the water and then out of the water I didn't know people still harpooning fish I thought that had gone away with the wailing days but it's such an interesting old way of catching a fish and it's very sustainable because you only kill the big ones or the ones that are mature you don't catch there's no by-catch if you're familiar with longlining they put out a single line about 30 miles along with a hook every couple hundred feet and it's just an indiscriminate killer and even if the fish are on their sides they have to throw them back dead so with the tuna fishing there's a little plane spotting the tuna from the air this is in Cape Cove and there's a harpooner on the pulpit in New England they call it a pulpit 40 foot platform off the bow 42 foot boat and then he throws the thing at the tuna and then the tuna dies but when they're in the first brought out of the water they're just so incredible the colors and the light pulsing on them just this you can't capture it I mean a photograph painting really can but you can try you can see the people reflected in the tuna that's a painting of a tuna I did years ago that's just for scale that's a harpoon boat that was Scotia for swordfish there's a swordfish that was harpoon you can see the dorsal fin and the swordfish over his left shoulder and that's a swordfish anyway I would talk more about it but you know I've never really seen a drawing of a swordfish where that big eye is depicted accurately so many pictures of swordfish are corrupted by people's other images of like marlin or other billfish but a swordfish is a totally different beast very strange I was so obsessed with looking at the eye that one of the fish would cut the eyeball one of the eyeballs out of my head and it was like a softball in my foot that's in my studio this is oh I forgot about these this is in Cape Verde Islands this summer I went to see a big blue marlin and there I'm painting it in the studio and here's the last couple of pictures and with the cod I think that's it thank you very much for listening I just wanted to give you some more about Lake Baikal oh I've never been to Lake Baikal the closest I've been itself is Lake Homeschool in northern Mongolia which is I think attached to Baikal but I've never been to actually to Lake Baikal itself I guess I mentioned those char were from a lake near Lake Baikal and that picture was taken by a Russian biologist named Sergei Alexev so I hadn't actually been to that particular lake where the picture was a little char with the little car but I've been around it I've been to Eastern Russia and the closest I've been to Baikal that was northern Mongolia is Lake Homeschool Lake I mentioned that in the National Geographic you want to talk about the huge problem in Lake Baikal yeah there could be Timon or Big Lenok in Lake Baikal I don't think there's time to make someone in like fish I think there's probably some sea monsters too but you don't want to make any people see that no I'm not a good idea we need to do a housekeeping Tim, distinguished gentleman with cardboard boxes is rendering up everybody's form for the pork rice and I just want to make sure that everybody who is interested knows that Is there any other fish you'd love to see in Spain Is there any particular fish you'd love to you know probably lots of them a lot of the reef fish tropical fish there were a couple I tried to get some of the beautiful grouper like a Nassau grouper and I never saw a nice size one and the Nassau grouper I wouldn't mind seeing one of those but yeah other trout I'd like to see some of you know some other I'd like to go to North Africa and look for other places with native trout Algeria apparently has trout but we've never went there but there's always Montana you know it doesn't can't be Montana so are all of your paintings that you do everything for these ocean fish yeah I painted them all actual size fish measurements so unfortunately in order to do it properly I could see the fish alive and dead that's why I went on some commercial boats but seeing the fish and then making them from a combination of photographs, sketches memory is really important just being there and a lot of measurements but it's tough because if you have a big marlin that's shaped like that when it sits on the dock of the dock of a boat it's like that so its head and tail are sloping away from it there's no way you can have people holding up the head and tail so you kind of just I don't know if you want to actually make it without the distortions at the end you sort of have to just play around but the swordfish actually does have a curve to it because I wanted to just paint it the way I saw it the predators standing over the deck of a boat and photographs aren't very reliable all the time because they inevitably distort stuff so the measurements and the photos don't match up so in the end it's just some conglomerate of stuff and it's it might be sort of accurate but who knows it's as accurate as I could make it but accuracy was one of my objectives I only injected there's more just capturing some essence of that experience of seeing that fish for the cod I went on a party boat you can go out on a boat with like 40 people and pay 50 bucks you fish all night for cod and that was fun but what's your pay to be these are watercolors mostly I've been staining the paper with tea colors that color and a lot of wash and I've been mixing mica powdered mica with the pigments to to give it a listening color I can't really see that from the pictures but another plastic based medium is like water soluble urethane and water soluble wax so I've been experimenting with different stuff but they're water soluble paints but mostly watercolors I do paint noils but not as much Seagulls so the local seagulls in Montana swooped down to oh and east and east too you mean that you watch them swoop down in the water from a bottle I love both and I see a lot of beautiful parallels between the two I mean anyone has ever seen a flying fish launch out a wave and glide like another it's just incredible and I've seen fish and birds work together to herd you know bait fish a lot of us have seen that but I was in the Amazon this crazy peacock bass and they were herding a bait up against the bank and they themselves were flopping on the shore but the bait was flopping all over the land and their wading birds were down there you know working with the peacock bass it looked like to corral these bait but I'm very interested in the transition zone between the two and what water does the surface of the water does between air and the stuff beneath the surface water you know reflects our world back to us but it also abstracts our world it kind of jumbles it up and I was talking about this earlier today but and then also the stuff at the bottom of the stream the rocks you can see it abstracts what's underneath so it's this really beautiful transitional zone and a lot of the colors of the fish and the patterns of the fish seem to mimic that the things that water do and the light does pass through water so I'm not sure that answers your question but I do I like to think about that stuff you know the public obviously has fascination with sharks shark weed you don't see anything about sharks do you not share that similar fascination? I the question is do I share the fascination with sharks that people watch sharks we discovered you know and I I only painted one shark for this ocean fish book and that's not because I don't like sharks but just logistically it was hard to see all these fish and I didn't want to kill a blue shark blue sharks are really easy to catch around where I live because nobody eats them I didn't want to just kill it and dump it I guess I could bury and grow tomato plants over it but but the make-up to me is an incredible fish and I as part of the research for this project I stocked different tournament docks this summer and previous summer there was a white marlin tournament in New Jersey in Cape Maryland and there's a couple different shark tournaments in Maine in the Cape and Montauk so I was at one and I try ahead of time to talk to the tournament organizers to let me go inside the ropes and look at the fish and until this summer I never really looked closely at the dentition on a Mako shark but the teeth are just spilling out of the mouth and it's such an amazing bullet-shaped creature I think it's the most sharky looking shark that I've ever seen more than a great white or tiger shark and actually some of the fish when I looked closer at them like a thresher shark or a blue shark I was actually disappointed when I found out what they actually look like because they're not sharky looking enough and even when the mouth is kind of open the teeth aren't showing enough but a Mako is just like hey you can't it's an incredible fish so I saw some smaller ones alive and when they're you know in the water they're like purple blue like the sun metallic weird color and some of you may have seen these fish but so I do like sharks I don't feel comfortable being in the water with them but I know some people do but they don't care but I just I like scuba diving but I don't like I don't feel as safe in the water than I do above the water but anyway maybe you like sharks it sounds like sharks are cool I have a two part question where are you going to be fishing this week and where is your favorite place to fish in Montana? in the west favorite place to fish in Montana I don't think I'll be fishing unless I stop at Bud's house and take a little cast is it possible to fish now? I guess maybe it is if you can hang on to the rod yeah I think I'll come back in the summer but I don't have any fishing plan on this trip Paul is supposed to take me to the park which sounds like fun maybe we'll see a trout in the hot spring but I love Montana what's not to love about Montana and I fished a bunch of rivers west older Missouri west Yellowstone or Boulder I don't know the names as well as you guys do but also small streams when I was looking for some of the native trout that was some of my favorite fishing fishing little creeks actually in the Yellowstone park Todd Cole the fisheries guy told me about this little creek where they found a pure stream west slope cutthroat trout in the park so either somebody put it there or it got there somehow so I went to this little creek I think it's called Wildcat Creek but do you know that creek Paul? later anyway maybe it's a secret but I caught these gorgeous little maybe I'm really like some secret but I love those little streams so anywhere I mean I went to this camp for summer in Kelly Wyoming in the Teton Valley there and that was just incredible it was on the Grovan River which goes in the snake and that was incredible and then some of the high country lakes where they introduced trout even though they're sort of native trout purists those experiences are great like in the headwars of the Green River the Green River lakes are one of my favorite mountain ranges hiked up to some little lakes this lake called the Baylor Lake and I saw introduced golden trout spawning in the outlet stream like nice fish yeah it's hard with the impossible to pick one place but I love Montana I hope to come back many times I want to make sure I do justice to the the drawing but I'm not sure I understand the procedure at this point and how it's going to be I know the procedure well you're going to draw excellent well we're going to draw your name I'm going to pick some all over here I think James should draw no, no I don't want to be responsible I'm going to draw you in your office work your hand around I'll draw a new read but we have James for you and the cool thing about this is that you can get personally inscribed he might even do a drawing for you sure Tony Lutnik Tony Tony there's two Eats out there and maybe we should all move out and have a reception for now wait a minute James, certainly be perfect there's also books if you hear more of your stories I'm not going to be let's thank you very much