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| A WORD FROM KIM RODY I first picked up a paintbrush as a high school student, where I took painting classes after school at the community college in Miami and from private instructors. I’ve taken instruction over the years because I love working with paint on canvas, but have always struggled over the landscapes and still lifes for months and months for each piece. Until I painted my first fish.
It was a fire goby, painted in 1995, which appeared on the canvas without effort all by itself. Then, a damsel. It practically jumped off the canvas. But I returned to the tedious landscapes, which were going nowhere. At the time, I was taking instruction from Kathy Windrow in Dallas, who wanted me to concentrate on a series in my work.
I decided to pursue painting fish, starting with small works on paper with acrylic, and, over a few years, working up to large, seven-foot canvases of sea turtles. For models, I take field trips to the local Dallas Aquariums, photograph my catch from spear fishing trips in Florida and the Caribbean, and scrounge deceased fish specimens from local fish stores, which they save for me in their freezers. Sometimes I buy whole fish from the local supermarket and stink up the studio for a few days while I paint them… dead fish are very good at keeping their pose.
I try to capture the personality of each model I paint. Each of these creatures has a life, and a story of their own. I recall one hunting trip where I was about eighty feet down, and came face to face with a beautiful 20-pound grouper. My Hawaiian sling was cocked, aimed directly at the victim, when that grouper made eye contact with me. I suffered a complete case of “buck fever”, and allowed my dinner to swim peaceably away while my father was frantically signaling toward the fish thinking I had not seen him. I HAD seen him, but he connected with me and I could not take him out of his heaven at that moment. This is the very feeling I want to convey to the viewers of my art: the soul of the individual sea creature as well as the surrounding peaceful environment where he is lucky enough to live out his entire life. I wish I lived down there.
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It
is a true joy to bring life to these sea creatures. They have wonderful
colors and textures that translate well with acrylics. There is an incredible
amount of detail and beauty when you look closely at a fish. As a matter
of fact, my fisherman father is now hooked on examining his catch and
noticing the fine art that exists in the scales, eyes and body of the
fish he spears and hooks. 
