She has carved out
a niche among anglers.
The Philadelphia Inquirer - Inquirer Magazine August 22, 1999
Local Angle
By Maggie
Galehouse
Ellen McCaleb
On the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Chesapeake Bay, Ellen McCaleb caught her first fish. She was 3 or 4 years old.
“In salt water, you never know what you are going to catch,” says the Phoenixville artist, now 30, who angled for tarpon and barracuda during her Florida honeymoon last spring. “It’s relaxing and also kind of exciting.”
McCaleb’s pastime became a profession when she discovered a way to honor preserve anglers’ efforts: trophy fish carving.
A narrow but rich artistic tradition, trophy fish carving took hold in England and Scotland in the mid-1800s. At the time, fly-fishing was the rage and anglers wanted to commemorate their catches. Since taxidermy deteriorated and damaged easily, and plaster of Paris models proved too heavy to hang, artists were commissioned to make life-size models of fish out of wood, which were then painted and mounted on oak.
McCaleb says most of the replicas you see today – in seafood restaurants and tackle shops – are made out of acrylic.
McCaleb first learned about trophy fish carving through a casual conversation at a decoy auction. Lured by her love and knowledge of fish, she tried her hand at a six-inch brook trout. She got hooked. She taught herself to carve and paint. And then she quit her job. That was two years ago. These days, anglers send McCaleb letters and photographs describing their catch – a 30-inch Alaskan rainbow trout, a 30-inch salmon from Scotland – and she goes to work.
Each fish takes a week or two to make: a couple days to carve from basswood and then another four or five to paint, finish and mount (see the results at www.fishcarvings.com.) McCaleb, who says that she is one of two traditional carvers in the country, charges between $600 and $3,000 per fish.
“The carvings have integrity as pieces of art,” says McCaleb, who would rather capture the spirit and beauty of a fish than create a precise, scale-by-scale replica. And although she doesn’t know the fate of every fish she fashions, she would like to believe that her clients are catch-and-release anglers and that the fish she brings to live in wood and oils are still out there somewhere, swimming around.
Maggie Galehouse is an Inquirer staff member.
