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A restaurant survives by doing the right thing: Part 2 of 2

By Ed Goldman

In Monday’s column, we revisited Scott’s Seafood on the River, a popular eatery that fought for survival while the Army Corps of Engineers shored up the levee on the Sacramento River—in the process, constructing a concrete wall that was 16 feet high and more than 280 feet wide, running the length of the restaurant and the next-door Westin Hotel.

A year-and-a-half after the wall was thrown up (pardon the verb choice), it was torn down, returning the river views that not only pleased diners but, more important, provided a backdrop for the restaurant’s many outdoor events, a significant part of its revenue.

I mentioned in my Monday column that Alan Irvine, who co-owns the eatery with his wife Sigrid, had put his artistic imagination to work, hiring a popular regional artist, Stephanie Taylor, to paint connected panels of nautically themed sights and verbiage. What hasn’t been discussed much is how Irvine chose to decorate the interior walls, making the dining experience both pictorial and piscatorial: a series of 33 Gyotaku (Gee-oh-TAH-koo) “fish prints” by California artist Christopher DeWees—”with more to come,” Irvine promises.

“Gyotaku” (魚拓, from gyo meaning “fish” + taku meaning “stone impression”) is a traditional Japanese method of “printing” fish, an art form more than 175 years old. Originally, fishermen used this “nature printing” to document their catches, the way people these days stand next to a very large fish they caught, turned vertically, and pose as though they’d just bested a rhinoceros in hand-to-horn combat. 

In practice, Gyotaku uses fish and other ocean denizens as its “printing plates,” deploying sumi ink and washi paper. DeWees’s work fills the walls of the main dining room at Scott’s. 

“I was first introduced to the specialized medium of fish printing by Tom Sharp in 1968 when we were graduate students at Humboldt State,” says DeWees. He has a master’s degree in fisheries from Humboldt and a Ph.D. in ecology from UC Davis, where he retired as a professor but continues to serve as a marine fisheries specialist.

“Exploring fish printing methods and materials with fellow fisheries students served as an excellent diversion from our studies,” DeWees says. It also proved “a way to earn a few dollars to pay the rent selling prints at fish festivals and in shopping malls.”  He expanded his knowledge of the art during his two years of Peace Corps service in Chile.

DeWees is 77 years old and still in fish-fighting trim. In addition to “playing a lot of tennis,” he’s still a fisherman, often using his own catches for his art. “Sometimes,” he says, “people who know what I do will bring me fish. Sometimes I’ll find a dead carp on a street and think, ‘Hey, I can print that!'” 

You’ve no doubt gathered that DeWees is lighthearted. Ironically, his name in Dutch means “lonely one”—which isn’t how most of us would characterize a man who’s been married since 1967 (his wife Christy is also an artist), the father of two sons (Morgan, who’s in the construction field and Benjamin, in biotech), and four grandkids. 

DeWees says that he’s developed contacts with other artists who specialize in print making over the years.  In the mid-1970s, squid and octopus expert Eric Hochberg, Jr., Pennsylvania botanist Robert Little, and DeWees put together the Nature Printing Society.” We expected to attract 15 or so people with similar passion for nature printing.  Little did we know that the Society would soon grow to over 300 members from around the world with newsletters, exhibitions, and annual workshops.”