First
a Hook, Then Ink: An Artist's Catch of the Day
By BRETT MARTIN
Published: August 8, 2007
MONTAUK, N.Y.
THIS is a fish story: a whopper (or at least a keeper)
about a peculiar intersection of nature, art and food. Annie Sessler, an artist
living here on the East End of Long Island, makes fish prints -- impressions of
sea life, mostly on vintage textiles, for which she uses fish themselves like
rubber stamps or wood blocks. The prints, made with a process dating to the
19th century, are lovely, often haunting images. To whatever extent a fish can
be said to have a personality, Ms. Sessler has a gift for capturing and
honoring it.
But before inspiration can strike, the fish must.
And that's where Ms. Sessler's husband, a longtime fisherman named Jim
Goldberg, comes in. It's an elegant hunter-gatherer arrangement: he catches the
fish; she prints the fish; then, together, they eat the fish.
''I'm not like other wives who sit at home, waiting
for jewelry,'' she said. ''When Jim comes home, I'm like, 'What fish did you
bring me?' ''
Early one misty summer morning, Mr. Goldberg, who
is 57, sun-blasted and wiry, headed out into Montauk's harbor in a small
borrowed boat. Baiting his hook with strips of squid, he puttered a few hundred
yards toward the mouth of the harbor, dropped his line and let the incoming
tide carry the boat back toward the dock.
After only a few such passes, just about the time
reveille sounded at the Coast Guard station on shore, he had already hauled up
a handsome fluke, a flounder and a sea robin. Many fishermen discard the
bottom-dwelling sea robin as inedible, but Mr. Goldberg said the firm tail meat
was delicious. Also, the prehistoric-looking head and spiny wings make
beautiful prints.
As the fog burned off, Mr. Goldberg steered his
boat into open water, toward Block Island Sound. Over the years he's made his
living as a lobsterman, a clam digger and a skipper on commercial draggers,
taking multiday trips miles offshore in search of cod and other fish. If there
is any reason to be nostalgic for those grueling, often freezing journeys, it's
the wild and weird varieties of sea life he used to bring home for Ms. Sessler:
dogfish, skate, John Dory.
Once his haul included a small, blazing red
deep-sea creature that the couple simply called Mystery Fish. Mr. Goldberg now
makes his living primarily by shaping and repairing surfboards, so his wife has
to make do with more quotidian species.
On this day, the catch included two bluefish that
Mr. Goldberg wrestled into the boat within 10 minutes of cutting the motor out
on the open water. The second fish flopped and squirmed in the bottom of the
boat as he tried to remove the hook with a delicate touch. ''Come on, lay down
and be quiet,'' he told the fish through gritted teeth, aware that broken
scales would provoke his wife's wrath.
His mesh sack filled with more than enough to
produce what he called a ''seafood extravaganza,'' Mr. Goldberg steered toward
shore. The meal, he promised, would be ''psycho.''
Like her husband, Ms. Sessler occasionally talks to
her fish. As Mr. Goldberg unloaded his catch in the garage, she peered into the
cooler and clapped her hands. ''Oh, you're beautiful!'' she said, lifting a
bluefish. She carried it inside by the tail and lay it in the kitchen sink to
begin the ''desliming'' process.
''You're gorgeous,'' she said, running warm water
over the body and gently sponging it with paper towels. ''I love you.'' Once,
when Mr. Goldberg arrived with a large yellowfin tuna, she had to climb into
the shower with it.
In Japan the tradition of fish printing, or
gyotaku, goes back to the 1800s, when fishermen began using ink and paper to
record their catch. Ms. Sessler, who studied design in college, began making
her fish prints two winters ago, when her husband got home from a long fishing
excursion. On a lark, he took a small scup, or porgy, and a stamp pad and
demonstrated how to make a print. Then he went to sleep. When he woke several
hours later, the house was filled with dozens of fish prints.
Since then, Ms. Sessler has made over a thousand
prints, refining her technique through trial and error. Under the name East End
Fish Prints, she began selling her prints last spring, for up to $2,500 each,
and quickly found an appreciative audience.
Alexa Van de Walle and her husband, Henry Owsley,
saw some of the prints at an arts fair in Southampton, N.Y., and promptly
bought eight for the dining room of their summer house.
''There's something wonderful about how organic
they are -- how they're truly something from nature,'' said Ms. Van de Walle,
who now owns 11 of the prints. ''It's not an abstraction of a fish. It is a
fish.''
Now Ms. Sessler placed her bluefish on a palette of
newspaper spread on the kitchen table. She used cotton balls and Q-Tips to plug
the nostrils, the anus and the hole where it had grabbed the hook. She stacked
additional sheaves of paper and cardboard under the tail and back fins, making
the surface of the body even and flat. She propped the toothy mouth open with a
tiny length of Q-Tip.
The effect of the final print would depend on how
the ink was applied. In some of Ms. Sessler's prints, sweeping brushwork is
visible, as though the subject had been caught mid-dart. In the spring, when
Mr. Goldberg night-fishes for migrating baby squid, the resulting prints have
the quick whorl of Japanese calligraphy. Most often, though, Ms. Sessler
strives for a delicate accuracy that rivals the etchings that might be found in
a 19th-century encyclopedia.
Using a small rubber roller and a series of
brushes, she applied a light patina of ink to the fish. She cut a sheet of
white satin and laid it over the fish like a shroud. Then, with the firm
fingers of a baker kneading dough, she began to rub the cloth, outlining the
fish's shape. Beneath her hands, the image slowly appeared, as though in a
brass rubbing.
In the water, the bluefish had been a shimmering
flash of blue and silver; soon enough, on a plate, it would be an anonymous
(though tasty) fillet. But now there was the opportunity to really look at the
fish: the powerful jaws; the delicate bloodline running from head to tail; the
intricate chicken-wire pattern of the scales. Making prints has given Ms.
Sessler a passionate appreciation for such anatomical details.
''The mahi-mahi has a bloodline like an EKG,'' she
said, rifling through representative prints. ''It spikes up and down. The John
Dory's is high and arcing, very fine. A tuna is amazing because it's super-slippery
in the front, and then there's almost a tear and you get into rougher scales.''
''I don't think of a fish as an object,'' she said.
''I think of it as a subject. I feel grateful when it reveals itself through
me.''
Soon enough there would be more reason to be
grateful. As Ms. Sessler finished printing a fish, she rinsed off the
water-soluble ink and handed it over to Mr. Goldberg for his extravaganza.
In addition to the fish he had caught that morning,
he had spent the afternoon buying local sweet corn and digging about a hundred
littleneck clams nearby, off Napeague. A fisherman friend had dropped off
striped bass fillets and a cooler full of squid. The couple's 3-year-old
daughter had returned from school, and a few old surfer and artist friends were
gathering in the yard.
He prepared the bass and bluefish with recipes from
his days cooking for crewmates on long dragger trips. He cut the bass into
chunks and set them in a dish of white vinegar before dredging them in Aunt
Jemima pancake mix and frying them in oil. The sweet, sharp-flavored nuggets
barely had a chance to cool before they were wolfed down.
The bluefish fillets received the most attention.
Mr. Goldberg placed them in foil with several handfuls of thinly sliced onions
and roughly chopped tomato. He topped this with three or four sizable pats of
cream cheese, two spoonfuls of mayonnaise and a few lumps of butter before
sealing the foil pouch and placing it on the grill alongside the clams and
corn.
Wouldn't all the toppings overwhelm the flavor of
the fish? Perhaps, Mr. Goldberg said, ''but I don't like bluefish.'' In fact,
though hardly Le Bernardin (or the American Heart Association, for that
matter), the mayo and cream cheese melted into a rich sludge that nicely offset
the oiliness of the fish.
In a little more than 10 hours, the bluefish had
gone from wild animal to art object to food for friends and family. Short of
passing by Mr. Goldberg's hook altogether, what fish could hope for a happier
fate?
Recipe: Creamy Barbecued Bluefish Adapted from Jim
Goldberg Time: 30 minutes
Adapted from Jim Goldberg
Time: 30 minutes
1 1/2 to 2 pounds fillets of bluefish or, if
preferred, mackerel
Kosher salt to taste
Ground black pepper to taste
Extra virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, sliced very thin
1 medium tomato, sliced thin
1 tablespoon mayonnaise
1 1/2-inch by 3-inch by 1/4-inch slab of cream
cheese, broken into small pieces
1 lemon, halved, one half left intact and the other
sliced thin
1 tablespoon butter.
1. Start grill or preheat oven to 450 degrees.
Rinse fillets, and pat dry. Season liberally with salt and pepper. Take two
large sheets of aluminum foil and curl up the edges, making a tray large enough
to hold fish and other ingredients. Rub foil with olive oil.
2. Spread a third of the onion slices on the foil,
followed by a third of the tomato slices. Place fillets over tomato and onion
layers. Place remaining onion over fillets, and dot evenly with mayonnaise.
3. Dot cream cheese pieces over onions. Squeeze
juice of intact half lemon over everything. Remove stray lemon pits. Place
remaining tomatoes over onions and fish. Salt again. Lay lemon slices over and
around fish.
4. Cover loosely with foil, and place on hot grill
or in oven. Cook 12 to 15 minutes, or until fish is cooked through. Remove foil
tray from grill or oven, and dot fish with butter. Serve with some of the
juices.
Yield: 4 servings.