fishy

I promised, a couple of weeks back, that I'd post a picture of something that we bought in Silver City NM, and here it is: a fish print.   More precisely, here's a fish who has been inked, and then used like a printing block, with its impression transferred to lightweight canvas.   Gyotaku - that's what we're talking about - was first used by Japanese fishermen in the early C19th to record the size of the fish that they caught - no stretching out of arms, and asserting that Yes, it was Really, Really Big, here ...  Today, there are a number of fish artists not just in Japan but in Hawaii - and printing, often, onto various specialist Japanese papers - and sometimes tinting the impression with water color, too [if anyone out there is wondering what I'd like for Christmas ...].   It's a wonderful way of creating one off art from the natural world without wastage - a number of these practitioners make a point of saying that they then eat the subject of their art work - like edible, scaly brass rubbings.