The Flyfish Journal - The Flyfish Journal 13.4
EXACTLY LIKE A MEMORY: ON RUSSELL CHATHAM’S DARK WATERS
Words: Greg Fitz 2022-06-24 09:33:56
Dark Waters 1988 Oil on canvas 24” x 18” Artwork: Russell Chatham
Russell Chatham’s best-known paintings are somber, meticulously subtle depictions of the western American landscape. The best of them shift effortlessly between intimacy and vastness and seem to glow as if lit internally by the hazy sunshine of Montana summers or the inscrutable, sourceless light of falling snow, cloud cover or twilight. Above all, they radiate stillness and quiet.
Figures and buildings are rare in these paintings and for all of Chatham’s renown as an angler and hunter, there are very few scenes of anyone actually fishing or aiming a gun. But one of my favorites, the 1988 painting “Dark Waters,” has an angler in it.
“Dark Waters” is modestly sized, a couple feet tall. It appeared on the cover of Chatham’s collection of fishing stories by the same name. In the painting, an angler wades a wide piece of low-gradient water, their back to the viewer. A thin band of sunlight is visible above the valley’s ridgeline and reflected in the water, but it’s unclear whether we’re looking at dawn or dusk. The whole image is bathed in a warm, dim light. There is no bright green in the bankside vegetation. It could be late autumn, or a dry, cold December day, or the transition from winter to spring when the snow has melted but it hasn’t quite been warm enough yet for new grass to start growing.
Chatham’s paintings possess a firm silence, but by most accounts he was a rambunctious, passionate character whose life was filled with hunting, angling, art-making, storytelling, food, intense relationships and dramatic successes and failures. Many articles written about him were little more than opportunities for blowhards and sycophants to make ridiculous claims about the nature of art, describe bottles of wine they were drinking, or name drop celebrities in Chatham’s orbit. I never met him, and I’ll spare you any thirdhand stories gleaned from other sources. I hope someone is writing a comprehensive biography of his life and work.
We lost Chatham a few years ago, but the paintings are with us. I’ve been able to see just a few in person, but I never pass up the opportunity. I’ve only seen “Dark Waters” in reproduction, but even then it has all the hallmarks of his best work.
More than anything, I admire the restraint. Subtlety is a misleading accomplishment. Blending close tones without turning the whole picture into gray mud is an exceedingly difficult task.
Chatham left his brushstrokes and scrumblings visible on the surface of the work, a mark of the artist’s hand, evidence of layers and layers of oil paint and time spent building something. I like paintings best when the physical accumulation of paint is inseparable from the image instead of being smoothed away. Digital photography and computer illustration provide that insane level of polish now. Let paint be paint. I love it the same way I like recordings of live music in which you can hear people talking, ice in glasses, amps buzzing or a horn player taking a deep breath before playing a phrase.
“Dark Waters” is a study in economy. It’s devoid of unnecessary drama, hype, extraneous details or conspicuous flourish. The composition is simply horizontal bars of sky, water and trees. The angler consists of a few faint marks, more implication than specific rendering. Somehow it all accumulates into a spare, modest image that holds in the mind’s eye exactly like a memory.
That memory for me is the short window bridging the end of spring and the beginning of summer, when the sulfurs hatched in the last hours of the day on Wisconsin spring creeks. For a few weeks each year—after the best caddis hatches and at least a month before tricos began—a rotating cast of friends and I would fish as many evenings as possible. Depending on the day’s temperature and sunshine, the hatch might be a blizzard at last light, a steady pulse of rising fish for a few hours, or it might never materialize at all. It’s a memory of warm evenings, cold water against my legs, pale yellow mayfly duns, hungry brown and brook trout slashing at emergers in riffles, and silhouetted bats and swallows overhead; night walks back to the car by headlamp; beers while trading notes and stowing gear; and late drives home while making plans to go again the following evening as soon as we could get away from work.
©Funny Feelings LLC. View All Articles.