New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
Artist challenges the boundaries of art, nature
In Genesis, God divides dark and night, earth and sea, then gives Adam the job of naming Eden's creatures.
In Ursula K. Le Guin's 1985 short story “She Unnames Them,” Eve, dissatisfied with the arbitrariness of the whole set-up, frees the birds and beasts from Adam's labeling. Nobody really minds. James Prosek understands both Adam and Eve.
“Without names, we can't communicate,” Prosek said at the Westport Library last week. “But it can create these separations.”
Prosek — acclaimed as an artist, writer and naturalist — gave the Caryl & Edna Haskins lecture for the Aspetuck Land Trust, which serves the towns of Westport, Weston, Easton, Fairfield and Monroe. It was the first time the land trust held a public event since the COVID-19 pandemic began, and the library's lecture space was nearly full for Proseck's talk.
It was titled “Trespassing and Conservation” and throughout it, Prosek returned to the push and pull of thinking beyond accepted ways — to trespass — and relying on those ways to communicate our shared experience — to conserve.
David Brant, the land trust's executive director, said in some ways, the trust is working along the same line. It's conserved about 23,000 acres in its town as public space. But it's also expanded on that idea, by getting over 1,000 private homeowners to increase the biodiversity in their own yards by planting native species, making lawns less of a green desert and avoiding pesticides and herbicides.
“People like the idea of creating biodiversity,” he said. “It gives people hope.”
Prosek's own boundarybreaking began as a young boy. He lived on a street in Easton that dead-ended against land owned by the Bridgeport Hydraulic Company — land that surrounded the Easton Reservoir. Eager to explore, he ignored the “No Trespassing” signs posted on the property.
Prosek said after his lecture that he isn't encouraging others to do the same. Protecting watershed land is important.
“But we create all these boundaries,” he said. “I'm encouraging people to challenge those boundaries.”
Prosek began drawing in early childhood. His father was a birder and by 5, Prosek was copying Roger Tory Peterson's bird guide warblers.
At 9, he learned to fish and became fascinated by those cold water beauties — trout.
Looking for a field guide for fish, and finding nothing that suited him, he painted all the trout species in North America and wrote “Trout: An Illustrated History.” Completed in his freshman year at Yale University, the
book became a classic, both for its art and for the conservation efforts it encouraged.
Since then, Prosek, 46, and still living on the same street in Easton that he grew up on, has written 12 books and won a 2002 Peabody Award for his work on a documentary about the great 17th century British angler and writer Izaak Walton.
His art has been exhibited at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Royal Academy of Arts in London and the Yale Museum of Art.
Prosek said in his lecture that while working on his first trout book, he learned that naturalists and ichthyologists couldn't always agree on common names and species names for the trout he was painting. It made him realize that labeling things often kept us as a distance for the thing itself. “I began to realize that language is a way to impose meaning that really can't explain nature,'' he said.
He also began to think about the ways humans become part of the landscape.
When an angler fashions a fly that looks like the real thing and casts it, and a trout rises to take it, he said, the brain of the fish and the brain of the angler connect. When hunters in the Arctic — disguising themselves as reindeer to hunt them — get too good as their disguise, Prosek said, local lore holds they cross over and become reindeer.
In recent years, Prosek has been painting his own species — parrotfish that are part parrot, part fish — cockatoos with Swiss army knife blades for head feathers and drillbeaked ducks. Again, he said, he's trying to break down boundaries.
But he's also come to realize, he said, that our incomplete, faulty language about nature — our labeling — forces people to strive, to reach out to communicate and grow.
“If we could send our thoughts telepathically, we'd lose our beautiful miscommunication,” he said. “The failure of language is what makes it beautiful.”