Fly Fishing Insider Podcast
Bold Coast Burns makes life-size fish art by burning wood with butane torches rather than a wood-burning pen, using metal kitchen utensils to mask the flame and cut sharp edges. A pen handles only fine detail around the eyes and mouth. Finished pieces get a UV-stabilized epoxy resin, and archival prints are mounted to wood the same way.
Dylan Stewart is the artist behind Bold Coast Burns, a Maine-raised, now Colorado-based fish artist, free diver and spearfisherman who works in wood burning, pen and ink, and epoxy-finished prints.
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How do you wood burn a fish at life size?
A standard wood-burning pen cannot cover a life-size blue marlin or tuna, so the answer was to abandon the pen for the bulk of the work. Every butane torch on the shelf at the hardware store got bought, and the burning moved to open flame on live-edge slabs. The pen now handles only the finest detail, mostly around the eyes and mouth of the fish.
How do you get sharp edges out of an open flame?
Open flame on wood blurs everything, so the fix came out of the kitchen drawer. Spatulas, forks and spoons get held against the wood as masks, shielding portions of the surface from the flame and leaving hard edges and odd textures behind. The comparison the artist reaches for is airbrushing or street art: the work is built on depth rather than fine line, and it resolves when the viewer steps back.
What is the largest wood burned fish?
The largest piece to date is a 17-foot great white shark burned for a restaurant in Newport, Rhode Island. It needed a purpose-built back brace, constructed with a builder friend, just to load it into a U-Haul and drive it down from Maine for installation. Like the smaller work it was all torch work, sealed with epoxy - and it may well be the largest wood burn anywhere.
What is an epoxy print mount?
The print mounts are a separate line from the burns. Archival prints come off a large-format printer in the studio, get mounted to wood, and are finished with the same epoxy resin used on the burns. Getting there meant rebuilding every original drawing at far larger resolution, with the finishing work now done on an iPad - an ancient technique on one bench and a fully digital one on the other.
How is fish art priced against a skin mount?
Commissioned wood burns are priced by the linear inch, which puts a finished piece in line with a taxidermy skin mount or slightly below it. Customers make that comparison constantly. The honest framing is that they are different disciplines rather than competing products - a skin mount and a burned panel of the same fish are two different things a person can hang.
Who commissions life-size fish art?
Roughly half the work is personal commission: someone came back from a trip of a lifetime and wants that specific fish on a wall. The other half is commercial, mostly restaurants, which in the northeast is a large market. Restaurant work compounds - once a piece hangs in one dining room, owners of other restaurants in the same town see it, and word of mouth carries as much of the business as social media does.
What does free diving teach an angler about fish?
Free diving in Maine means working in six feet of visibility, comfortable to around 80 feet, with maybe a two-minute breath hold in the water against four-plus minutes on a couch. Sinking onto the bottom and staying still lets spooked fish return, and striped bass will re-form into a slow tornado around a motionless diver. That is the payoff for fly anglers: a ledge they have cast striped bass over for years can finally be seen from below.
Key takeaways
- Life-size wood burning is torch work, not pen work - a burning pen is reserved for detail around eyes and mouth.
- Metal kitchen utensils held against the wood mask the flame and are what produce sharp edges and texture.
- Ask for UV-stabilized epoxy on any finished piece meant to hang where light hits it; it costs more and holds up longer.
- Commissioned fish art is quoted by the linear inch, landing at or just below skin-mount pricing.
- Restaurant commissions generate more restaurant commissions - one installed piece is the best marketing for the next.
- For a fish artist, the fish itself is the audience: each species unlocks a separate community, including unglamorous ones nobody makes art for.
