I grew up in a coastal village surrounded by fish and until recently, I had never thought of myself as a predator. That changed when I spent some time looking at a remarkable book, Ocean Fishes, on the watercolors and conservation activities of James Prosek.

Prosek is a self-taught painter, an angler, a conservationist, and an activist. Ocean Fishes (Rizzoli 2012) presents his watercolor paintings of Atlantic game fish large and small, from the blackfish native to Long Island Sound to the mighty bluefin tuna, prized for its sushi-grade flesh. Western Atlantic bluefin are estimated to be at less than 3 percent of 1960 populations. The once-ubiquitous fish are now so rare that a single giant bluefin can fetch thousands of dollars in a Japanese market.

Each painting captures the shimmering scales, brilliant unblinking eye, and extraordinary coloration of Prosek’s subjects. While scientifically accurate through field notes, sketches, and photographs, they are more than natural history illustrations. In his text, the artist speaks of the moment when a fish just pulled out of the ocean gives up its life; for many, there is a moment when the creature shimmers with a glow of natural phosphorescence before it expires. In his paintings, Prosek has captured his experience of the sea creature’s existence as a way of shining another light on the need to preserve these declining species.

In the book Prosek tells how this series of paintings came about. In 2003, he had the opportunity to join fishing guide Norman St. Pierre to follow schools of bluefin in Cape Cod Bay and the Atlantic by plane and boat. “We saw basking sharks and whales and seals and schools of small bluefin, but no giants—individuals over 400 pounds," he wrote. "For the last two of my five days I accompanied the captain of the boat…and his son….For most of these two days neither the boat nor Norman saw any fish. And then, in an instant, I watched unfold one of the most astonishing, athletic, adrenalin-filled, perfectly coordinated predatory events I’d ever seen.

 “Norman communicated the position of the fish with the captain’s son, who was at the wheel, via radio. As the son pushed the throttle down, the father ran out onto the forty-foot [harpooning] platform and held on. The event was out of another time. These were the last of the old New England whaling men, and though now they were pursuing a fish, it still came down to a man holding a spear with a bronze head, called a ‘lily,’ and throwing it at a great ocean creature. ‘Seven boat lengths straight ahead.’ I could hear Norman’s voice over the radio, directing the boat as it sped ahead. ‘Four boat lengths, two boat lengths, OK, you should see the fish now, about eight feet under water.’ At fifteen knots, with a fish moving just as fast beneath him, the captain threw the spear and hit the fish. Moments later, they hauled the tuna onto the boat, a beautiful 750-pound giant. In the next minutes they harpooned a second one—in the last hour of the last day that I was with them, after five days of seeing very little.”

You can join James Prosek for his talk at The Explorers Club on November 19, 7:00 pm [doors open at 6 pm]. 46 East 70^th Street, NY, NY. Information.

The exhibition Ocean Fishes continues through January 21, 2012 at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, 1900 Benjamin Franklin Parkway, Philadelphia, PA. Information. On December 5^th James Prosek will be awarded the Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.  Among previous recipients:  Roger Tory Peterson, Ansel Adams, Peter Matthiessen and John McPhee. He will give a talk at ANS on December 5. Information. Photographs © Jason Houston.