The Fish Painter

King Sailfish Mounts is on a mission to get more anglers to release more fish. Chris Murrah helps them do it.

- By Nate Matthews Photographs by Jon Whittle

Skin mounts kill. Replicas don't. But turning raw fiberglass blanks into lifelike reproductions takes an artist who knows his fish.

Chris Murrah is really into African pompano right now. Surfer, angler, jazz musician, and now lead painter at King Sailfish Mounts, he grew up in East Fort Lauderdale fishing on the Tarpon River. His dad was in the car business. His mom worked for St. Anthony's school. In the mornings before school, he would hear the bait boats banging cast nets off the metal poles on the bridge behind his house. In the afternoons, when he wasn't out playing his saxophone, catching sets off the beach, or chasing jacks and snook in the river, he liked to paint surfboards.

"I guess I always did art on my own," Murrah says. "I've never taken an art class. We were just into surfing, and I was into painting, so I would paint surfboards, skateboards, T-shirts, that sort of thing. I liked painting three-dimensional objects. I never really did sit down in front of canvas, but I was always painting something. Some kind of object. Maybe that's what drew me into painting fish."

African Pompano (top) are the hardest fish Murrah gets to paint. He uses colors that cost $400 per quart just to capture the changing patterns on their flanks, but he's still not happy with the result. "The next step is to get them fully chromed out first," he says.

And paint them he does, turning dead, gray fiberglass into bright, living creatures that look like you just lifted them out of the water. He loves the challenge of it. "That pompano is like an enigma," he says. "You can't figure out what's happening. It's so chrome, yet there's all kinds of interference. Iridescent colors flashing that you can only see at certain angles, depending on which way the light is hitting it. The color seems to dance across it."