72 Maine St., Brunswick, ME 207 798-6888
presents
JEAN KIGEL: GYOTAKU
as featured in Down East Magazine*
More than twenty gyotaku fish monoprints on exhibit daily all summer through September 2012
Brunswick:
Gyotaku : The Ancient
Art of Japanese Fish Prints
As featured in
Down East Magazaine
An exhibit of Japanese fish prints by Jean Kigel debuts
at Little Tokyo in Brunswick this April.
What better place to view gyotaku
fish monoprints than at a restaurant with Tokyo-trained chefs and Japanese
out-fittings. Guests may treat
themselves to an artistic array of sushi at the table and
gyotaku prints on the walls.
The artist has always loved fish.
As an adult she knew that her life would be incomplete without depicting
this precious resource. She grew up in a
family that fished recreationally – both on Moosehead Lake and on Muscongus Bay.
During the Colonial days, her home town of Warren was saved from
starvation by a spring run of alewives.
Already established in her career as a watercolorist and
Asian brush painter, Kigel discovered gyotaku after her trip to Japan.
Gyotaku (gee – a – TA – ku),
the art of printing fish, originated in Japan centuries ago as a way of
documenting the size of a catch.
The walls of Japanese tackle and fish shops once were draped with sumi fish
prints. In modern times
gyotaku has evolved into an art form.
Before printing a whole, un-gutted fish, Kigel prepares its scales with
salt, and its fins and gills with batten and clay.
Then she applies printers’ ink in varying tones and colors directly onto
the fish. The image of the fish is
transferred to paper by using hands as a press.
Depending on the thickness of the inking, every scale, fin, and gill may
print. A single fish can be
ghost-printed or re-inked and printed again, often with unexpected effects.
Prints can be as realistic or as abstract as one likes, and each is
unique.
Kigel has printed more than twenty species of fish
including mackerel, cod, bass, trout, flounder, pollock, skate, John Dory,
tilapia, and sculpin. These
have been exhibited at Archipelago Gallery in Rockland, the Maine Art Gallery in
Wiscasset, Summer Island Studio in Brunswick, and Tidemark Gallery in Waldoboro.
The Down East Magazine and
Pacific Fishery Magazine have
featured her gyotaku work.
Art from the Sea
By: Cynthia Anderson
Gyotaku Sturgeon Series: Harlequin by Jean Kigel
Jean Kigel
embraces the wabi-sabi nature of her art — of finding beauty in imperfection.
But she doesn’t welcome ooze. Ooze has ruined more than a few prints, and it can
happen if she fails to prep every orifice of the fish beneath her hands as
meticulously as a doctor attending to a surgical site. “You can’t be too
careful,” Kigel says.
Hence the cotton batting packed into the twenty-four-inch pollock’s mouth,
belly, gills, nostrils, and vent. Clear-eyed and shining, it lies on the
business section of yesterday’s New York Times. It’s been cleaned with
dish soap and alcohol. Kigel runs her fingers down the pollock’s side, touches
the barbel on its chin. “I want to make sure I get this,” she says of the
whisker-like structure.
The practice of gyotaku — Japanese fish printing — is as natural in Kigel’s
Waldoboro kitchen as the boats that bob in the harbor just yards from the
cottage itself. Indeed, there seems affinity between the vivid immediacy of
Maine sea life and the traditional art form. Gyotaku now sells briskly at
Kigel’s shows, and a number of Maine galleries have begun to include it in their
exhibitions. The College of the Atlantic holds gyotaku in its permanent
collection, and the University of Maine Museum of Art (UMMA) hosted a 2009
exhibition of fish prints and accompanying demonstrations of the technique…
“I’m thinking purple,” Kigel eventually says, whimsy today trumping realism. She
squeezes the color from a tube of block-print ink onto a butcher’s tray. With a
palette knife, she mixes in dabs of white and black. The technique for coating
the fish with ink looks deceptively simple. Kigel uses a sheep’s hairbrush to
apply liberal amounts to its entire side. Then comes the art: extra white on its
belly, bits of black, spritzes from a bottle of water to ease hard lines.
Deftly, Kigel adds ink here and removes it there. She checks every fin for
coverage — dorsal, pectoral, caudal, and gill, seven altogether — then leaves
the fish to sit.
In a few minutes, when she presses paper around it to make a print, it can’t be
too wet, and it can’t be too dry…
Kigel, already an accomplished artist who’d studied Asian brush painting in
Japan, China, and the United States, first attempted gyotaku five years ago
after learning about it from a friend. Initially, there were difficulties: torn
fins, too-wet paper that ripped, packing that wouldn’t stay lodged. As it
happened, that winter she was reading Callum Roberts’ account of the effects of
overfishing, The Unnatural History of the Sea. “It really affected me,”
she says. “I wanted to intensify public awareness . . . [I wanted my work] to
capture dwindling species, both common and exotic…
Thus inspired, Kigel worked through the winter and spring. By summer she had a
few prints she felt good enough about to include in a show entitled “Alewives
and the Asian Aesthetic.” She’s since exhibited gyotaku at a variety of Maine
galleries; characteristic of her work is a “fossilized” look that originated in
small holes and depressions in the fish itself — “a happy accident” she now
cultivates. Sometimes she ghost-prints or re-inks a single fish to produce an
overlapping school. She still welcomes wabi-sabi: “A fold in the paper . . . a
surprise blending of tones or colors, something uncentered, uncertain —
something like fishing itself”…
There’s also a technical aspect to the work. Reference materials cover the
kitchen table: A.J. McClane and Keith Gardner’s Game Fish of North America,
an Audubon book on fish, several detailed renderings of haddock and rainbow
trout, and pages of fish profiles. From a variety of printing papers, Kigel
selects gold-flecked shuen for the pollock. Wetting a brush, she draws a line
down the middle of a large sheet then tears it in two…
Kigel smiles. “Getting there,” she says. She has an upstairs studio, but gyotaku
commandeers the kitchen because it can be messy.
She begins to press the shuen onto the fish, applying careful pressure
to capture every feature. “Like magic,” she says of the process. She checks for
slime — none, thankfully — then spreads out a fin that is slightly collapsed.
When the paper is completely fitted around the outer half of the fish (the other
side is left un-inked), Kigel starts to peel back the shuen. Here is where
disasters are most apt to occur: a major smear, for instance, or a puncture.
This time, in spite of her care, the paper tears slightly at the pollock’s
mouth. But it’s a small error, one that likely won’t be noticeable when Kigel
wet-mounts the piece onto heavier stock. Later she will paint a background for
the fish, add an eye and other details. She’ll conclude by signing her name
vertically and including her Asian chop in red cinnabar.
The sun has dropped, the wind died. The evening will be fair. But Kigel is not
thinking about the weather. Her gaze is
outward, but her focus is inward, she’ll tell you, on the whole haddock and the
trout stored in her refrigerator, on tomorrow’s gyotaku and its possibilities.