About the Artist
I came early to both art and fishing. First, the fishing part: I spent every summer, from the time I was born until after college, at my grandparents’ cottage on Lake Wesauking, a cool, clear, spring-fed lake in the Endless Mountains of northeastern Pennsylvania, pursuing sunfish, perch, pickerel, and bass with plugs and a bait-casting rod and reel. There was an old — steel — fly rod in a back corner of the garage, and at about age eight, I decided to give it a try. Armed with a Royal Wulff from Western Auto, I attached my regular reel and line and my only fly. I’d heard that fly casing was “tricky,” but after a frustrating day of 10-foot “casts,” I decided it was far too tricky for me.
Twenty years later, I found myself in graduate school at Stanford, and shortly thereafter, I married a fourth-generation San Franciscan whom I’d met studying art in Greece six years earlier. Northern California was obviously the only place to settle, and while there were no lakes to which I had any access, there were lots of trout streams. A colleague in the ad business let me try his fly rod — with an actual fly line, this time — and I was hooked.
The art part came from my mother, who had an MFA from Pratt Institute and was a noted painter in our hometown of Pittsburgh. I’ve been drawing and painting as long as I can remember and got an art history degree from Princeton. Although I was more a marketer and copywriter in my advertising career than an art director, I am now painting full-time and try to combine painting and fly fishing whenever possible. I take a sketch pad and pens or pencils whenever I fish, and this helps on those days when there’s a lot of fishing and not much catching. Fortunately, trout don’t live in ugly places. My favorite relatively close fishing destinations are in the Redding-Burney area: the Fall River, Hat Creek, the McCloud, and the upper Sacramento.
What I try to do in my paintings is to capture the essence of what is depicted, a distillation that I also strive to make pleasing to the eye in terms of form and color and texture. As distillations, the paintings are abstractions, but are nonetheless representational — almost always, they start with something I see. Sometimes an individual painting will stay pretty representational, sometimes it will end up more and more abstract. At some point in the process, the painting takes over, and it goes where it wants to go. I’m just there to do the mechanics.
I typically work by doing a plein-air study, then a larger or more finished version in my studio. I am particularly attracted to the planes and abstract patterns and visual rhythms of Edward Hopper, Richard Diebenkorn, Nicklaus de Stael, and Raimonds Staprans.
For more information, go to my Web site, http://www.Hawkoakstudios.com. My art is also available at four Northern California galleries: The Christopher Hill Galleries in St. Helena and in Healdsburg, the Lafayette Gallery in Lafayette, and the Valley Art Gallery in Walnut Creek.
Geoff Meredith
