A Folio, Book of Fishing (Suite of four block prints)—2006

I am from a family of fishermen who migrated from the South in the early 1940’s, specifically Louisiana, Texas and Florida. While they left much behind, what they brought with them was a love for being out of doors on the lakes fishing for food to feed the family and sometimes the whole neighborhood. What set us apart from the Native Americans and the Scandinavians who came before us was our ritual of fishing for bottom fish. For years after my family’s arrival in the Northwest in the 1940’s there was no concept or talk of trout or steelhead. It was catfish, crappy and perch that lived in our dreams. Hence my narrative starts with a search for night crawlers and earthworms.