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would love to get a hold of a crustacean this size. |
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Fishart
Details: Through September 15
Open daily
9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
$1-$3
(214) 670-8443
Where: Dallas Aquarium,
1462 First Ave
in Fair Park
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Calendar
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Kim Rody's
Fishart paintings likely feel right at home at the Dallas
Aquarium in Fair Park. Around them swim the fish, shrimp, turtles,
and other aquatic life forms that inspired (and occasionally modeled
for) the artist. They also probably feel relieved. Some of Rody's
other Fishart paintings have hung in Daddy Jack's in Deep
Ellum, Café Brazil at Lake Ray Hubbard, and other places where
their real counterparts hang around only until they're the next order.
They get sautéed, fried, and grilled, not examined, glanced
at, or passed by visitors walking the cool, darkened halls of the
60-year-old Art Deco building.
Rody, a fish-loving
scuba diver stranded in land-locked Texas, paints from her experiences
in her native Florida and by studying the inhabitants of the aquarium,
which have been gathered from across the world. She applies acrylic
to canvas with a heavy hand, brushing the paint into textures to
create water movement, coral, and underwater plants. Four of the
paintings mark the entrances to the glass tank walkways; almost a
dozen more fill the walls of a gallery between the conservation breeding
room and the bathrooms.
She uses
an Impressionistic style in which dabs of different-colored paint
blend to make the glistening side of a fish in motion or the mottled
shell of a sea turtle. That, combined with her textures, makes the
paintings look like the underwater photographs taken by scuba divers
at the Great Barrier Reef and other places where brightly colored
fish dart through turquoise water, white sands, and brilliant plants.
But she paints more than just Technicolor sea life. Two paintings
show translucent creatures swimming across a black background. One
is a jellyfish. Several feet away in a black-light tank, a number
of glass-like jellyfish propel their umbrella-shaped frames across
dark waters. Many other paintings can be matched with their inspirations.
The aquarium's
other new addition would make an interesting, if not challenging,
model for Rody. The Pacific octopus, which moved in just last week,
occupies a red-lit tank on the back wall near the Flooded Amazon
Rainforest. It shares its tank with several flower-like anemones
but seems most content attaching its tentacles to the front of the
glass tank and pulling itself around.
Besides the
new Fishart exhibit and the octopus, the aquarium has another
change: The sharks are not currently on display. Two stuffed sharks
still hang above the tank, but the real ones aren't there. However,
there are plenty of other dangerous sea dwellers to peruse. A school
of piranhas occupy a tank in the back right-hand corner with tetras
and other smaller, prettier fish. Don't worry. The little fish are
safe. Piranhas eat only diseased or wounded fish unless they're starving
or provoked. Visitors can watch them dine at 2:30 p.m. every Tuesday,
Thursday, and Saturday. The aquarium also has electric eels, stonefish
with scales that look like rocks, a stingray, and a pair of American
alligators. Other oddities include fish that live in the desert,
walking batfish, glass catfish, and blindfish and salamanders that
live in caves.
Then there
are Rody's favorite subjects--the exotic fish, crustaceans, and turtles.
The aquarium showcases fish from all the major bodies of water from
the Trinity River to the Nile and the Gulf of Mexico to the Red Sea.
There are starfish, sea horses, crabs, shrimp, and a living coral
reef, plus an example of the largest freshwater fish and a 135-pound
alligator snapping turtle. Its back looks like a submerged gator
when it's swimming, and it eats fish attracted by its worm-like pink
tongue, not alligators. Like Rody's paintings, the turtle and the
aquarium's other residents will be hanging around all summer.
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