Russell Chatham Remembered
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. __________________ 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









