Eleanor Kish

Eleanor (Ely) Kish (October 11, 1924 – October 12, 2014) was an American artist, best known for her paleoart depicting dinosaurs during the 1970s until the mid-1990s, many of which are on public display in museum collections.

Kish was born in 1924 in Newark, New Jersey.[1] She was the daughter of Eugene Kiss and Teresa Bittman, although she later changed her last name. Throughout her career, she painted multiple scenes of paleoart, under the direction of paleontologists such as Dale Russell, or commissioned by museums across North America. She painted a majority of her works during the 1970s until the mid-1990s, a majority being for public display, while 31 remain in museum collections.[2] Some of her most prominent works are the illustrations she produced for the book An Odyssey in Time: The Dinosaurs of North America. She created paintings of dinosaurs such as Apatosaurus, Massospondylus or Corythosaurus in the environments they were believed to live in at the time. However, her art does show a typical inaccuracy of early art, termed "shrink-wrapping", where the life restoration of an animal is relatively devoid of soft tissue or muscle, representing a skeleton with skin.[3] Kish died October 12, 2014 at the age of 90.[2]