South Portland Maker Nate Garrett’s Fish Prints Are Reeling In Fans

By Sara Ann Donnelly
Photos by Ryan David Brown
From our September 2024 issue

It took Nate Garrett four years to find his pogie person. A practitioner of the Japanese art of gyotaku, in which a fish acts as a printing plate, Garrett wanted to honor the important role pogies play as bait, animal feed, and fertilizer. But while he had fishmongers and fishermen who’d call him when they received, say, an especially fine salmon, tuna, or striped-bass specimen, he’d yet to make inroads with someone willing to part with some pogies, which are subject to strict quotas in Maine. Every year, at the start of pogie-fishing season in early summer, Garrett, who’s based in South Portland, put out a call for the fish on his Instagram account, to no avail. Then, in June, he reached out to an oyster farmer he knows, who passed him along to a tuna-boat captain, who put him in touch with Harpswell commercial fisherman Josh Morse, who invited Garrett to peruse the prettiest of his pogie catch. “I have more in common with the lobstermen and fishermen of Maine than I do with other artists, and it all has to do with the fish,” Garrett says. “In gyotaku, you’re bound by that connection.”

Garrett plans to depict the “trash fish” (the pejorative for a catch most people would turn their noses up at eating), currently stored in one of his three chest freezers, as a school with silvery flesh, slate-gray fins, and shiny golden eyes. Not as regal as the yellowtail he rendered with neon-yellow and shimmery-teal stripes or the red snapper he immortalized with thickly scaled crimson flesh and a fringed dorsal fin that reads like a crown, but a dignified tribute nonetheless.

The earliest recorded example of gyotaku dates to 1837 Japan, when a samurai lord’s calligrapher imprinted a massive carp on rice paper. Soon, fish printing became a common form of prized-catch documentation. Early examples, done with soot-and-water sumi ink on white paper, were stark, but modern artists have introduced colorful inks and papers. A recreational fisherman, Garrett began collecting gyotaku prints 15 years ago. In 2015, he tried the technique for himself and became hooked. Two years later, he quit his job as an IT manager and began running his business, Big Fish Gyotaku, full-time from his home studio.

Garrett divides his work into printing days and finishing days. The former entail waking up at dawn to remove the slimy coatings from thawed fish with salt and vinegar in a sink or bathtub. If a fish is thick, he stuffs it with paper towels or a form he’s carved from styrofoam insulation before sealing the gills and other orifices with medical cotton and superglue. “When the fish is dead, it can ooze, and we don’t want that,” he says. Next, Garrett pins the body and fins to a board and makes a print using the “direct method,” brushing the flesh with ink and pressing damp paper over it, or the “indirect method,” layering silk or paper over the fish and dabbing ink onto the area covering the creature with a silk-covered cotton ball, a technique that yields finer details. Either way, Garrett says, “it’s a smelly process.” And yet, if a fish is very fresh, wasn’t stuffed, and was printed with nontoxic ink, like the traditional sumi, he and his wife might enjoy it for dinner.

Nate Garrett carved fish decoys before gyotaku fish prints hooked him. In 2022, his print of a bluefin-tuna tail appeared on a limited-edition ale by Batson River Brewing & Distilling.

On finishing days, Garrett uses a fine brush to add details such as eyes, scales, and gills to a dried print. “If you look at gyotaku historically, they are trying to make the fish look alive or just recently caught, and that’s something I’m trying to evoke as well,” he says. The eyes are critical, and Garrett keeps a dog-eared journal filled with variations he paints and repaints in a range of shades.

Piercing, light-flecked eyes animate the nine varieties of fish native to Bath or its sister city, Tsugaru, Japan, that Garrett printed for his first solo museum show, at Bath’s Maine Maritime Museum. All were sourced from his Portland suppliers, Browne Trading Company and Harbor Fish Market, and rendered on handmade ivory paper that helps the images to pop. Whether you’re viewing one of the midcoast’s common striped bass or a subtropical threadfin, Garrett says, “I want you to be wowed by the fish.”