The painting
A child stands in a crocheted orange fish hat, googly-eyed, fins flopping. Behind them an adult crouches barefoot, both arms wrapped around the child. Both faces are tipped upward. A fishing hook comes down on a taut line from the top of the canvas and catches the jacket's hood. Across the child's rolled jeans, a yellow anchor.
The phrase originates from fishing, and its application to people strikes me as rather dehumanizing — reducing lives and families to transactional procedures.
Dana Ellyn
The painting was made in 2025, out of the shifting language and policy around immigration. The fish hat gives the image a tinge of absurdity; the adult figure, who may or may not be the child's mother, takes a protective posture. Ellyn considered adding an American flag lure to the hook, to point at the seductive promise of opportunity, and left it off.
How it got there
The journal invited contributors to submit up to three works, and encouraged them to include work by other artists they admired. Mary Becker Weiss — a collage artist whose own Grief and Save Our Democracy appear in the same feature — used her invitation to put forward two artists besides herself.
Your Catch and Release painting has hit the mark we have all been striving for.
Mary Becker Weiss, in an email to Dana Ellyn
She sent four pieces in total: her own two collages, Ellyn's painting, and Nancy Caralyn Illman's The Uplifting Staircase, a 2021 mural in Takoma Park, Maryland. She has since said she wasn't sure the editors would take all four. They did — and one of them wrote back directly to say how strong she found the group.
Ellyn submitted nothing. She supplied the attribution line and a jpeg.
The feature
The Maine Arts Journal is the quarterly of the Union of Maine Visual Artists. This issue introduced Right Now! as a new, recurring section — a primarily visual feature, interspersed with short written reflections, presenting how artists in the journal's community are responding to current events.
The Spring 2026 edition ran work by twenty-two named artists, plus pieces credited to ARRT NYC Ad Box and Common Dreams. Collage, monoprint, papier-mâché, protest placards, sculpture made from unserviceable flags, studio photographs, journal pages. Ellyn's is one of the few oil paintings in it, and one of a small number of works by an artist based outside Maine.
I paint without fear or favor. It's not my role to tell viewers what to think — but rather to encourage them to think for themselves.
Dana Ellyn