Fife Arms Hotel, Scotland
Artist, writer and naturalist James Prosek published his first book at nineteen years of age, ‘Trout: an Illustrated History’, which featured seventy of his watercolour paintings of the trout of North America. He has exhibited at various institutions including The Royal Academy of Arts in London, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, The Yale Center for British Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. 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 seventeenth-century author of The Compleat Angler. He is currently working on a book about how and why we name and order the natural world.
In Autumn 2017 Prosek spent a month on the Invercauld Estate as an artist-in-residence. He immersed himself in the local area and community, completing a series of watercolour paintings of the local flora and fauna – the red grouse, ptarmigan, the heather moors and forests, mushrooms, landscapes of the Dee Valley and of course the stags! The series of watercolours are now on view at The Fife Arms. After this he was tasked with designing a coat of arms for The Fife Arms and conceived of a Flying Stag.
The magnificent Flying Stag draws together the various central strands that run through the hotel – art, food, hospitality and, of course, a warm welcome. Prosek felt a hybrid creature would be the perfect way to embody these diverse aspects, and he selected the two creatures he had grown most fond of during his stay in the Cairngorms – the stag and the ptarmigan. These two animals marry the high alpine habitats and the lower pine valley ecosystems, where ultimately the well-being of one depends on the other – evocative of the delicate balance of nature. Hybrids being liminal creatures, transitional and ambiguous, rouse a series of emotions – they are unsettling, mythical and intriguing, causing us to look at the world around us afresh.
In Prosek’s sublimely detailed painting ‘Flying Stag, Cairngorms, Scotland’ (2018) we find a red stag elegantly rearing up on its hind legs, with white ptarmigan wings cascading down its back. Red grouse fly above the stag and at its feet are a peacock and red admiral butterfly. The only coloured flower, the rest are displayed in silhouette, is the thistle – the symbol of Scotland. Prosek has numbered the red grouse in a manner reminiscent of old field guides to help walkers identify what they see. However, in a beguiling turn no associated key is found. This is intentional, as Prosek prefers viewers to enjoy the diversity of form, texture and shape as opposed to satisfying an urge to tick off ‘items’ seen. In doing so the artist exposes our innate desire as humans to name, order and classify nature - to give words and language to a world that doesn’t need them, altering our own perceptions, and understanding, rather than living and enjoying through direct experience and observation.
