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Eileen Klatt
A Litany of Salmon
Lost Horse Press is especially pleased to present a non-literary
event of great substance, consequence and beauty, that you will certainly applaud
my overstepping Lost Horse Press’s literary boundary . . . Lost Horse Press is
most pleased to present the exclusive Sandpoint showing of Eileen
Klatt’s latest watercolors, A
Litany of Salmon—Exhibit, Slide Presentation and Lecture—at
Oden Hall (143 Sunnyside Road, Sandpoint, Idaho) on November 11, 2005
at 7 o’clock in the evening. Beth Pedersen will provide music appropriate
to salmon. Refreshments will be available. The program is free, but donations
will be accepted.
About the Artist
Eileen Klatt received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Washington State University in 1990. Since that time she has painted hundreds of fish, concentrating on species indigenous to the Northwest. Her watercolors of trout are collected internationally. Eileen has spent the past 10 years studying and painting salmon in the Columbia River Basin. This exhibit is a culmination of those ten years of research and fieldwork. Eileen lives and paints in Hope, Idaho.
A Litany of Salmon
A Litany of Salmon is an invocation to the millions of salmon that once
thrived in the Columbia River Basin. These life-sized watercolors represent the
sixty-one populations of salmon that are now extinct in the Columbia and Snake
Rivers.
Every summer and fall for the past 10,000 years, the Columbia River teemed with salmon returning to their rivers of origin to spawn and die. Less than 100 years ago an estimated 16 million salmon migrated up the Columbia River each year to their natal waters in nearly every river in the Columbia Basin.
In 1991 only four sockeye salmon returned to Red Fish Lake in central Idaho prompting the listing of the Snake River sockeye as endangered under the Endangered Species Act. Throughout the Pacific Northwest salmon populations plummeted to all time lows; other listings quickly followed. An inventory of Pacific Salmon in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, and California in the early 1990s identified 61 stocks of salmon that are extinct in the Columbia River Basin alone. (A stock is a native, naturally spawning population genetically distinct and uniquely adapted to a particular river or stream.)
Each of these paintings represents an extinct stock of salmon in the Columbia River Basin. They are watercolor portraits of male and female salmon in their spawning colors and forms. During this stage of their life cycle, salmon transform into an amazing variety of shapes and colors, which visually express the individuality of each stock. The salmon portrayed are life-sized and species specific to the extinct stock they represent.
A Litany of Salmon invokes the salmon river by river, species by species
as it names and remembers that which we have sacrificed to the paradigm of progress.
As you stand before these salmon, imagine 16,000,000 of them every year and multiply
that times 10,000 years. As you do, you begin to get a sense of the magnitude
of mass extinction that has taken place in less than 100 years.
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