Artist, writer, naturalist, angler James Prosek will speak about his work at Manchester Community College in the Great Path Community Commons on April 8 at 3 PM. Prosek is visiting MCC as part of the Dehn Foundation Visiting Artist Series (which I coordinate) and his work is currently on exhibit at the New Britain Museum of American Art. James Prosek made his authorial debut at nineteen years of age while an undergraduate at Yale University with Trout: an Illustrated History, which featured seventy of his watercolor paintings. He has since published numerous books, including Eels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso (2010), a New York Times Book Review editor’s choice, and the subject of a documentary for the PBS series “Nature” that aired in 2013. His most recent book Ocean Fishes (2012) is a collection of paintings of 35 Atlantic fish, all of which were painted life size. Prosek has written for The New York Times and National Geographic Magazine and won a Peabody Award in 2003 for his documentary about traveling through England in the footsteps of Izaak Walton, the seventeenth-century author of The Complete Angler. He co-founded a conservation initiative called World Trout in 2004 with Yvon Chouinard, the owner of Patagonia clothing company, which raises money for coldwater habitat conservation through the sale of T-shirts featuring trout paintings. He has also written a novel and recorded three CDs with his group The Troutband. I designed the packaging for their last CD, Monkey’s Wedding.
