Remember This Day.119.VKS
36″x48″ acrylic on canvas
By Val Kropiwnicki
I fish a local river that has “put and take” Atlantic salmon stocked into it a few times a year. I wade through spent nipper bottles and used condoms, over lost toys and missing credit cards to get to the runs that hold fish – it is urban fishing at its best.
My favorite time to fish here is during snow storms or in the rain, alone, when there is something surreal about the juxtaposition of city sounds, train whistles and swinging a fly to a fish that roamed these waters freely a few hundred years earlier.
Fishing for and catching these fish is both beautiful and ugly at the same time, and inspired by this I wanted to create a piece that spoke to environmental issues, denial (as in these captive bred fish never really stood a chance of survival in this wild), and the present state of our “look at me” culture.
