"I’ve been utilizing the current Stay Home. Stay Safe. Save Lives. Executive Order to spend some uninterrupted hours on this oil painting of my relative Rab Hamilton. He is a prawn fisherman and mountaineer living in Cuil Bay, Scotland. On my last visit to him in 2018 he took my fiancé, brother, and I out in his boat onto Loch Linnhe and Loch Leven and showed us how to pull-up the creels, gather the prawns, bait the creels with salted herring, and shoot them back out into the water without losing any fingers.

His mouth is caught open, whether it is to tell you the Gaelic name of each of the hills that rise up from the shoreline and beyond, to belt out a sea shanty to a green horn fisherman who is new to “the outdoor life,” or to regale you with tales of past mountaineering expeditions. His nose is rosy with the brisk November wind coming down from the mountains and off of the water. His etched crows feet are evidence of a life lived with an authentically rugged spirit for adventure. His gaze is cast off into the distance, perhaps tinged with dread for the collapsing fisheries aggravated by the undiscerning gluttony of the large scale commercial fishing operations— a threat to his way of life as, “the last of the hunters.” A sole proprietor whose line of creels is guided by experience and knowledge of the loch and who takes only what is ready to be gotten. It is a look which knows that, “the seas have had enough.”

Prawns crawl out from the creel and into the tangled rope below. Crabs, an octopus, a dogfish shark, and other sea life swirl around him. Anticipatory sea gulls wheel above his head hoping to make a meal out of the unsought creatures as they are thrown overboard, intent on resuming their life in the watery depths. These cycles revolve and feed off one another, echoing the natural pursuit of living off the land, in a manner of speaking." -Alex Gilford