Taxidermic (2006-07)

These are paintings made directly from imprints and stencils from flora and fauna. I wanted to see what would happen if the subject itself was the under-painting. I wanted preserve the thing (a herring or mackrel) by using the thing itself to make a visual record, from which I would then embellish with paint. I took a one-step-removed in this idea by making elaborate stencils of photographs from a 1920’s taxidermic pamphlet. These mounts (trout, buck deer, passenger pigeons) also strive for a kind of fidelity to specimens taken from the natural world.