Though I hope I’ve paid my dues in hours-spent on the water with rod in hand and an occasional fish in the net, the idea of painting the trout stream is always as challenging to me as the finding and landing the fish itself. I’ve known an artist or two who did it differently; fishing came first and maybe painting would follow - or then again maybe it would not. I’m not knocking their priorities, artists come in all sizes and shapes, just as pointing dogs do.

One painter who seemed to have struck a good balance between fishing and painting was Ogden Pleissner. His work with fly fishing scenes shows his love for the sport as well as his ability to portray it. And his flawless draftsmanship and thorough understanding of color and value enabled his paintings to connect solidly with other fishermen. He was frequently the guest of successful businessmen who collected his art and who had access to stretches of fertile streams. Ogden kind of summed it up when he wrote in Peter Bergh’s book, The Art of Ogden Pleissner, “I think a lot of these people would ask me to come back because I knew one end of a salmon rod from the other, and I wasn’t a dummy at fly fishing.“

I once had the privilege of spending a day or two with the late Vince Marinaro, fly fisherman, author and lecturer, on his favorite stream, the Letort, in Pennsylvania. This was in preparation for a portrait I was commissioned to do of him. I learned quite a bit about trout fishing from that visit as I did about him. He was also interested in painting and pictures of fishing scenes, so we got along quite well. Later, he gave me a signed copy of his book, “The Ring of the Rise”, and in it he had written, “To Bob Abbett, whose skill in painting qualifies him to paint the scenes of fly fishing”. Had I been asked, I might have preferred it to read “Fly fishing possesses the qualities which make it a suitable subject for an Abbett painting.” I don’t know ….

An interesting side note, Vince was a rather conservative person, very polite and he followed tradition - the rules and limits, and never encroached on another fisherman’s beat, etc. But oddly, he always carried a salmon sized landing net, slung over one shoulder. It seems somewhere in his past he had hooked into a super trout, fighting it down stream for several hundred yards, and somehow navigating a bridge or two in the process, during which the monster evaded several attempts to net it in his standard sized net. And, of course, he lost the fish. I did not see Vince again but once since our time together and should have asked if he still carried that thirty inch net around - to be ready if lady luck struck again.

Vince’s style of fishing was to look for the fish. Rather than flaying the waters indiscriminately as we so often see, he would study and read the water and his knowledge enabled him to concentrate on probable locations for fish to be, dictated by both the stream’s surface and bottom, its current and the character of the shoreline, etc. More than not he would actually see the fish before he cast.

His interest in the surface of a stream’s water interested me as well, and taught me to pay attention to this important element seen in any piece of moving water. So my idea of a successful fishing painting is that it show, with some discrimination, the various textures and reflections which can often define it’s structure and often even the conditions beneath. Picture wise, these elements, if well painted, can add additional pleasure to those viewing it, so much more than will a blue, mono-textural rendition.

Our art habits go way back: in grade school, if the ‘drawing teacher’ assigned us the job of painting a lake or river, all of us leapt for the blue Crayola and dutifully and energetically waxed the surface of our water till it glowed like a blue neon sign. In reality, recognizing this years later, a small or medium stream with trees on either side may reflect much more tree-line than sky. Also, we all know, there are days and days when the sky is anything but blue, and we still might fish during them, or paint them, and their color will certainly affect their reflections on any water we depict.

So I found it works to portray water by first painting in an undertone of khaki and then where the sky’s reflections occur, be they in the form of flat water or ripples, they can be brushed in blue over the khaki and for some reason they immediately render the water WET. So one of my personal criteria in judging a fly fishing paintings, is to look for colors other than blue used in the water. In fact, in many instances, the water will have much more brownish colors than these blue reflections, including places where the river bottom is visible.

The painting, “Stalking the Brown”, is an example of some of these painting theories of mine. The stream itself is Connecticut’s Aspetuck, running down through the towns of New Milford and Bridgewater, and eventually to Long Island Sound near Westport. My good friend and fishing/hunting buddy, Norb Lillis, seen on the left, is envied by all of us for his access to a sizeable stretch of the Aspetuck. Norb, when not fly fishing or hunting, is Deputy Chief of Police in New Milford. While we’re at it, our other fisherman is Bob Gandt, former Navy F/A-18 pilot turned successful author, “Shadows of War”, being his most recent aviation/adventure book.

As I was along that day with my artist’s hat on, I liked the actual scenario which unfolded - as when they noticed a ring of the rise and instinctively crouched and became stalkers rather than fishermen. As Vince Marinaro had showed me, part of fishing is often hunting. And you will notice the very scant use of blue on the Aspetuck that morning, and yet I hope you will agree the water looks wet. As we look out underneath the bridge we can see a rougher area where the ripples do pick up some sky color, and further upstream there is a small cataract as well. The rest is all reflections from the bridge and surrounding trees.

Several brown trout were taken that morning, which I actually found rather inspiring in a way when I later ended up in the studio building the picture. In other words, the picture was not conceived by fantasy, but by a successful bit of fly fishing. With an artist’s license, the covered bridge was imported, via photography, from a site visited in Pennsylvania some months before.

Speaking of photography, as I mentioned in a previous column, “….these days neither animals nor artists are trained to work from life”: streams are likewise quite inhospitable locations for, easels, paints and the whole set up. In these cases, photography is a marvelous tool. Earlier, In our travels around the country in search of subject matter for paintings, wife Marilyn and I visited many well known fly fishing locations as well as beautiful but little known waters, and I
have built up a sizable library of photography as a result. From the Madison’s bridges in Montana, or Nelson’s Ranch on the Yellowstone to the well known fishing creeks in the shadow of the Tetons at the Circle H Ranch near Jackson, Wyoming, I’ve been able to somehow keep from dropping a camera into the water. Knock wood. But I never tire of the challenge and every time I pass a stream with an Orvis clad figure’s line etching that graceful curve, my heart skips a beat and I’ll start looking for a place to park. There just might be the stuff of another fly fishing painting down there somewhere!