My favorite Chatham painting
But he was also known for his lithographs, this one being my favorite
Stephen Collector, a good friend of Chatam’s before he passed, loves photographing in the fog, which was also coincidentally prevalent in a lot of Chatham images
Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, Russell Chatham, Jim Fergus, Stephen Collector formed a tribe for birds and tarpon in the wake of Hemingway’s passing. John Gierach, Archie Best, and Mike Clark sort of did the same thing with dry flies and bamboo rods in wake of Lee Wulff. Tides come and tides go, some bigger than others. But the ones who write and photograph about it leave something behind for us all to enjoy.
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Russell Chatham (October 27, 1939 – November 10, 2019) was a contemporary American landscape artist and author who spent most of his career living in Livingston, Montana. He was essentially self-taught and his work eschewed the narrative tendency of much western art and presented landscapes that stand in intimate relationship towards the human figure even in the absence of it. In the early 1980s Chatham began making lithographs and stood as one of the world’s foremost practitioners of that craft.
In addition to Lithography, Chatham also produced original oil paintings. His oil paintings currently sell for tens of thousands of dollars, and there was a multi-year waiting list for commissions, but according to his dealers, he preferred printing lithographs as the more challenging art form. (Longtime Livingston residents can recall a time when early in his career Chatham traded his canvases for essential services in a barter arrangement.) Despite being a print, Chatham’s lithographs have little to do with modern process lithography, which always starts from a photograph and typically only uses 4 colors. His art lithographs may have 30 or 40 different layers of color, all of which have to be hand drawn on to the printing plate, and the colors selected for the final effect. To see some of the early proofs of one of his prints is to see a study in vivid and unusual colors from which it is almost impossible to conceive of the final subtle shadings and quiet colors.[4]
In addition to his work as a painter, Chatham also authored several books. a series of short stories “Dark Waters” in which he detailed the exploits of his hunting friends, like the author Jim Harrison. The stories were Rabelaisian, vulgar, and exquisitely written (one suspects with a little help from his literary friends). William Hjortsberg disputed this during a presentation in Livingston on 9/12/2008. “He is quite a good writer in his own right,” Hjortsberg said. They center on hunting, fly fishing, food, wine and life changes. One story centers around preparing roast duck on an annual outing devoted solely to excess.[4][5] In addition to “Dark Waters”, Chatham authored several books about fly fishing.
Many of Chatham’s painted works have adorned the covers of Harrison‘s works.
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From Wikipedia
