The Washington Post
''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large nati ...
'', April 12, 1990. Accessed November 1, 2017. was a Canadian artist, best known for her
paleoart
Paleoart (also spelled palaeoart, paleo-art, or paleo art) is any original artistic work that attempts to depict prehistoric life according to scientific evidence. Works of paleoart may be representations of fossil remains or imagined depiction ...
depicting dinosaurs and other prehistoric life.
Early life and career
Eleanor Kish was born in
Newark, New Jersey
Newark ( , ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of New Jersey and the seat of Essex County and the second largest city within the New York metropolitan area. 1924. She was the daughter of the painter, actor, and decorator Eugene Kiss and Teresa Bittman. Kish had six siblings, including a brother named Eugene. She changed her last name from Kiss to Kish in 1973.
Kish graduated from the Essex country vocational school in productive art in 1942. During
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
, the then 18-year old Kish began working for the
Pennsylvania Railroad
The Pennsylvania Railroad (reporting mark PRR), legal name The Pennsylvania Railroad Company also known as the "Pennsy", was an American Class I railroad that was established in 1846 and headquartered in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It was named ...
as a mechanic and then a carpenter. While in this job, she was one day a witness to an accident and made a sketch of it for the insurance company. Impressed with the quality of her work, the insurance company hired her as an artist and she was sent on trips throughout New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York to record details of accidents.
After the war, Kish began working as an illustrator and freelance artist full-time and traveled around for various jobs. In the late 1940s to the early 1950s she attended various art schools. For a time she studied fine art under the painters
Ejnar Hansen
Ejnar Hansen (20 December 1898 – 26 March 1947) was a Danish wrestler
Wrestling is a series of combat sports involving grappling-type techniques such as clinch fighting, throws and takedowns, joint locks, pins and other grappling ...
and Julian Ritter in California. Her work eventually brought her to Canada and in 1960 she became a Canadian citizen. Kish received considerable attention in Canada for her wildlife art. Early in her career her artwork was exhibited at a museum in Mexico and at the
Cleveland Museum of Art
The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) is an art museum in Cleveland, Ohio, located in the Wade Park District, in the University Circle neighborhood on the city's east side. Internationally renowned for its substantial holdings of Asian and Egyptian ...
.
Paleoart
Kish's career in paleoart began in 1974, when she was approached by the paleontologist
Dale Russell
Dale Alan Russell (27 December 1937 – 21 December 2019)
was an American-Canadian geologist and palaeontologist. Throughout his career Russell worked as the Curator of Fossil Vertebrates at the Canadian Museum of Nature, Research Professor a ...
to produce artwork for a slide projection show about dinosaurs for children. Russell had become aware of her work through a large mural Kish had painted in the Canadian Museum of Nature. He was so impressed with her work that he also commissioned Kish to illustrate his books. In addition to Russell, another prominent expert Kish worked with was the paleobotanist David Jarzen. Kish reached further prominence due to her illustrations being used for Russell's two books ''A Vanished World: The Dinosaurs of Western Canada'' (1981) and ''An Odyssey in Time: The Dinosaurs of North America'' (1989), both books that were later considered "masterpieces". Kish remains one of the few prominent women paleoartists.
In the early 1990s, Kish was commissioned by the
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...
to paint a great mural of extinct aquatic life, titled ''Life in the Ancient Seas''. The project took two years and Kish considered it to have "made her career", earning her enough money to fund a studio for herself. Kish was one of the top paleoartists in the 1970s to 1990s and in conjunction with the dinosaur renaissance was one of the artists who produced art depicting the then new idea of dinosaurs as dynamic animals, becoming one of the most important artists in introducing these new conceptions of dinosaurs to new audiences. Kish was one of the few paleoartists who in addition to restoring prehistoric life also used dinosaurs in art to comment on contemporary issues, among other things using them as tools to dramatize the threat of contemporary climate change. Kish was active in a time when the climate change was just beginning to be publicized; many of her paintings show dinosaurs in extreme climates and she painted several scenes depicting the
Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event
The Cretaceous–Paleogene (K–Pg) extinction event (also known as the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction) was a sudden mass extinction of three-quarters of the plant and animal species on Earth, approximately 66 million years ago. With the ...
.
While painting prehistoric animals, Kish had access to both fossil bones and measurements and she frequently consulted paleontologists, often several different researchers for a single painting or mural. She produced models before painting in order to get proportions and shadows right. She was thus part of the then increasingly prevalent anatomically rigorous approach to paleoart. For life appearance, she often took inspiration from modern animals; before painting one of her murals depicting extinct aquatic life she for instance studied live fish and whales. In recent times, several of Kish's dinosaurs have been assessed as "shrink-wrapped", i.e. possessing unrealistically low amounts of soft tissue. This approach to dinosaur reconstruction was not rare in Kish's time and can also be seen in work by several other artists. Kish paid much attention to the coloration of the animals she depicted and took their ecological roles and niches into account when deciding how to paint them. An ''Hypacrosaurus'' painted by Kish in 1974 was one of the first life-restorations of a dinosaur to incorporate a complex color scheme.
Personal life
Kish was married to Huguette Vrancken.
Eleanor Kish died on October 12, 2014, aged 90. At her own request there was no funeral ceremony held.
Legacy
Kish's depictions of prehistoric life made her a world-famous artist. Her murals still decorate several museums. Most of her paintings are no longer on public display, though they remain in museum collections.