Artist, writer, naturalist, and Yale graduate James Prosek made his authorial debut at 19 with Trout: an Illustrated History (Alfred A. Knopf), which featured 70 of his watercolor paintings. 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 17th-century author of The Compleat Angler. His bookEels: An Exploration, from New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World's Most Amazing and Mysterious Fish, is the subject of a documentary for PBS series "Nature" to air this spring. His latest book is a collection of paintings of 35 Atlantic fishes called Ocean Fishes (Rizzoli, 2012).
This fall, Prosek was awarded the Gold Medal for Distinction in Natural History Art from the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. 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.
Prosek is a curatorial affiliate of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, and a member of the board of the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies. He is working on a book about how we name and order the natural world.
His work is on display at Taft through February 1.