Local fisherman has an alternative to mounting

Brett Swindell never had much of an eye for art.

Until that day in Costa Rica, when he watched an older gentleman performing the Japanese art of Gyotaku.

"He was rubbing ink on this dried fish, then he took rice paper, placed it on the fish and rubbed it," Swindell said. "He was just some guy that kind of hung around. We'd give him rides when he needed them.

"But what he was doing was really neat. It just kind of stuck in my head."

At the time, Swindell didn't realize the man was a "fish rubber."

Gyotaku is designed to preserve the memory of somebody's catch, kind of like a photograph or a mount.

When the craft re-emerged in Swindell's mind two years after seeing it, he realized it might be a good alternative to taxidermy.

Life-sized fish mounts, either real skin ones or fiberglass reproductions, can take up a lot of space. They also have become expensive.

Because he is still learning this art form, Swindell's rubbings start at $50 without matting or framing.

"I just think it's a neat alternative to be able to show off a special catch," said Swindell, 38, who was born in Norfolk and raised in Portsmouth. "I've got no formal training at this, but I'm learning every time I do one.

"The good thing is that you don't really have to be an artist to do this well."

To do a rubbing, Swindell gets one side of the fish as dry as possible. He then smears ink over the dry side. Once the fish is covered with ink, Swindell places rice paper over the fish and rubs it to make an impression.

"It's kind of like using the fish as a printing block," he said.

The "print" can be left as is or colored to more closely resemble the fish.

According to gyotaku.com artist Naoki Hayashi of Hawaii, the form started approximately 100 years ago in Japan as a means for divers and anglers to preserve the memory of a prized catch before serving it for dinner.

Hayashi - one of the world's best-known Gyotaku artists - has taken the form even further. He sometimes uses T-shirts instead of rice paper, and even transfers images of his works onto surfboards and other objects.

While Swindell masters the technique, his goal is to expose anglers to a different way of preserving the memory of their catch.

"Right now, there is an identity issue, especially around here," he said. "Most people think it's a painting.

"But the print you see is the fish you caught."

Swindell has business and information technology degrees from Old Dominion University. He used his education to start a software engineering company in California.

All the while, he was hunting, fishing and surfing. Art was the furthest thing from his mind.

When business slowed, he sold everything and moved to Costa Rica to surf and fish.

"I knew Costa Rica from surfing and just thought it would be a great place to get away from it all," he said. "At the time, all kinds of people had all these ways of making money down there.

"But none of them panned out."

Swindell formed close ties with several charter captains and marina owners. He still manages Web sites for some of them.

He left Costa Rica at the beginning of the year, moving to Suffolk to help take care of his parents.

"Dad had back surgery, I was getting tired of Costa Rica... it was just kind of a conspiracy of things that brought me home," he said.

Swindell said he has his degrees and Web site experience to fall back on should he need to, but he's hoping he can make a financial go of his newfound artistic talent.

"Right now, it's just me trying to learn and get the word out that this is another option for people," he said. "I'm also starting to do more scenes with more than one fish and with different species. Those are what the really good guys are doing.

"But for me, right now, this is so people can preserve their trophy catch. And if done properly, they can still take the fish home and eat it."

Lee Tolliver, (757) 222-5844, lee.tolliver@pilotonline.com