All That's Left is Bones

This is a recently finished painting that evolved from my notebook first sketched out years ago. I am interested in the migration and life cycle of salmon, an interest that goes back to my studies as a fisheries biologist. It also incorporates the form of a fish fossil that I sculpted from heavy molding paste. The photograph was printed on canvas, it's of a fresh sea run pink salmon caught in Alaska. The fossil depicts the end of the salmons long journey upstream to reproduce and die and return to it's origins.
Here is the detail of the sculpted skeleton of the salmon.


Photograph on Canvas
Mixed Media
2009

One of my favorite structures is the New York Central Terminal in Buffalo, NY where I grew up near the train yards. This is a great picture from 1928 during it's construction. As with my sculptures I'm more interested in forms that are in process, still incomplete, when you can see the under structure. It seems to feed more into the imagination rather than a finished work.