FISH

About the Book

Fish is a stunning celebration of this continent's great fish, mostly game fish, with a sprinkling of fun (pumpkin seed sunfish), history (shad), and culinary delights (bluefish). These detailed, never-before-published watercolor portraits, with text by the master of sport fishing, Dean Clarke, combine to make an upscale guide for the naturalist, an aid to the angler, a tool for the educator and conservationist, and an enjoyable read for everyone. It's part field guide and part angler's soul, but most of all a feast for the eyes.

Every fish has a story, and this book presents 77 incredible tales of hunting, studying, catching, and eating fish. Each portrait is accompanied by tips on bait and habitat. Also included are essays on the state of our oceans, and species conservation efforts. Artist Flick Ford's watercolors of individual specimens--many of which he caught--are rendered in a unique technique that captures the perfection of the fish at the moment it was pulled from the water. Everyone who fishes longs to land "the big one," and here it is--the best catch of the season for sport-fishermen and weekend anglers alike.

The book was the recipient of the 2007 Independent Booksellers Best Coffee Table Art Book Award.

Meet the Authors

Dean Travis Clarke has been executive editor at World Publications for the past fifteen years, where he works on Sport Fishing, Marlin, Fly-Fishing in Saltwaters, and Boating Life magazines. He also hosts the popular Sport Fishing Magazine television show on the Outdoor Life Network. He lives on Florida's east coast. Flick Ford fell in love with fishing at age five. His father, an accomplished fly-fisherman and talented commercial artist/copywriter, instilled in him a deep respect for nature and nurtured his early creativity.Born in 1954 in Atlanta, Flick was raised in Westchester County, New York. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Flick fished the Adirondacks, New England, Long Island Sound, Chesapeake Bay, Virginia and the woodland lakes of Quebec, while pursuing two other loves: music (as lead singer in a garage rock band) and art. He took formal watercolor classes in the 1960s; figure drawing and graphic design classes from 1973 to 1976 and then studied art at Evergreen State College in Washington State.Flick moved to New York City in 1978 and dove into the audio/visual scene including indie film, video, underground publishing, cartooning, illustration as well as reconnecting with music. He performed in the East Village with several bands, and wrote and sang lead in The Crazy Pages for almost twenty years.Ford left New York in 1993, heading for the Hudson Highlands where he quickly became obsessed with fishing the NYC watershed. As he branched out to many of the brook trout places where he had previously fished in parts of the Adirondacks and Vermont, the effects of over twenty years of pollution, over-development and acid rain became painfully apparent." I felt I should start to keep a record of the fish I caught and decided to do it in watercolor paintings. I just want to catch and paint these fish, and show how they appear to me in all their iridescent beauty."Today Ford makes his home in Putnam County, New York. He fishes more than 100 days a year and ties his own flies. He selects early every fish he paints for its relative size and beauty. After landing a fish, he quickly gets a digital photo before the colors fade, carefully measures it in all dimensions, sketches details, counts scales, fin rays and finally traces it to get its actual outline. He has developed a technique of successive washes utilizing masking friskets and painstakingly detailed dry brush that make these fish truly come to life on paper. Peter Kaminsky is the author and coauthor of many books, including Pig Perfect, Culinary Intelligence, Seven Fires and Mallmann on Fire (with Francis Mallmann), and Charred and Scruffed (with Adam Perry Lang). He is a longtime contributor to Food & Wine and a former columnist for The New York Times and New York magazine. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.