Most Russell Chatham paintings contain a small monogram in place of a traditional signature. It’s a two-dimensional calligraphic character, set within a double oval and drawn in the shape of a distinctive slough near the mouth of Lagunitas Creek where it flows into Tomales Bay in Marin. Once a salmon and steelhead reliquary called Paper Mill Creek, its source high on Mount Tamalpais, and fed by San Geronimo Creek, Devil’s Gulch, Nicasio Creek, and Olema Creek, it was for Chatham, a lifelong painter and angler, “the epicenter of my relationship with the natural world.”
Chatham spent his formative years fishing there and capturing on canvas the natural splendor of Marin and coastal Northern California. After four decades as a Montana resident, he returned to his epicenter, to the small town of Marshall on Tomales Bay at the edge of Point Reyes, to play out the final chapter of his life.
It was a life journey that could have come straight out of a novel by his friend Jim Harrison. Chatham wasn’t just a legend — he was several legends. He would find fame first as a fly fisher, then as an author of outdoor stories, and again as a painter whose canvases would be prized by Hollywood celebrities and serious art collectors. As if that wasn’t enough, he also started up a highly praised publishing house and opened an insanely popular restaurant in Montana. He would fall in and out of love too many times, make and lose several fortunes, and become a role model for a kind of life that is lived more abundantly. He had an oversize appetite for art, literature, music, sex, food and drink, and the sporting life. He probably caught around twenty thousand striped bass and an equal number of steelhead and Pacific salmon on a fly rod, making him perhaps the best coastal fly fisher of his era after his mentor Bill Schaadt, a legend in his own right. But to the larger world outside of fly-fishing circles, Russell Chatham was regarded in his lifetime as America’s finest contemporary landscape painter.
“With the exception of painting, nothing in this life has held my interest as much as fishing,” he wrote in the introduction to his book Dark Waters. “Fishing, in my estimation, is not a hobby, a diversion, a pastime, a sport, an interest, a challenge, or an escape. Like painting, it is a necessary passion.”
Chatham was born on October 27, 1939, in San Francisco and grew up there in a house in Pacific Heights. His father, a Stanford graduate absorbed in the family’s Alameda lumber business, was a direct descendant of William Pitt, first Earl of Chatham. His mother came from Swiss-Italian peasant stock. “Which is why I’m comfortable sleeping under a trestle and going to dinner in a castle,” he once said in an interview. His maternal grandfather was Gottardo Piazzoni, a painter and muralist who was the biggest artistic influence in Chatham’s life. His grandfather lived a life of genteel poverty, but was renowned for his paintings of the Northern California landscape. Especially prized were the fourteen giant murals Piazzoni painted for the entrance of the old San Francisco Public Library, now housed in the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum in Golden Gate Park.
When Russ was five, his grandfather lurched forward suddenly at the breakfast table in front of him and died on the spot, but not before calmly telling his family, “Goodbye.” His mother had often taken the boy to his grandfather’s studio, where the kid would gaze up in awe at the old man working high on a scaffold to finish the library panels. Even at that early age, the little boy sensed in the presence of his grandfather and in the paintings that hung in his childhood home the feeling that there is something in the making of art and in the landscape of Northern California that is sacred.
The child also grew up believing that trout and salmon are equally worthy of veneration. He gleaned this insight after his first childhood glimpse of tiny trout flashing in the reflections of Chupinas Creek, a gentle stream flowing through the Piazzoni ranch in Carmel Valley, where Chatham spent boyhood summers with his cousin Tom Wood. And in Paper Mill Creek, where Chatham’s father took the boy to fish on weekends, at first with spinning gear and later with a fly rod. And in his uncle Phil Wood’s cabin on the Russian River north of San Francisco. Phil Wood was an artist, too, and he supplied Russ and Tom with oil paints and easels, as well as their first lessons in fly casting.
Chatham grew up in an era when fly fishing wasn’t the sport and business it has become today, but more a kind of private eccentricity, and his fishing was as deeply personal as his painting. It seemed that the boy rarely left the house without a wooden sketch box or a fly rod. At age ten, Chatham’s family moved from Pacific Heights to the Sleepy Hollow neighborhood of San Anselmo, across the bay. West Marin was still rural enough in those days that you could fire a shotgun in the backyard. Chatham would bicycle over to Lagunitas Creek to fish or in low water to take rough counts of coho salmon spawning in the pools. At age sixteen, he got his driver’s license and pointed his used jalopy toward the coastal rivers. He spent the next fifteen years doing little else but fishing, hunting, and painting.
It was a kind of Golden Age. California’s rivers were still in their prime, salmon and winter steelhead were plentiful, but few anglers in that era believed these fish could be tempted to rise off the bottom to chase a fly. They simply weren’t suited to traditional “greased-line” methods used by fly fishers. A small band of happy warriors in the San Francisco Bay Area were working on the problem. These mavericks were splicing heavy fly lines onto thin running lines, experimenting with different sink rates, and designing new and powerful rod tapers to get the kind of distance and depth necessary to reach the sea-run fish when they poured into California’s rivers on their spawning runs. One of the first things Phil Wood did was send young Russ and Tom over to the Golden Gate Angling and Casting Club in Golden Gate Park, where a lot of those experiments were underway, and turn them loose on the casting ponds. There they learned long-distance casting under the tutelage and critical gaze of some of the world’s best hands.
In time, Chatham went from watching his heroes — phenomenal fishermen and distance casters such as Bill Schaadt, Frank Allen, Charlie Napoli, and Alan Curtis — to standing beside them in a river, matching them cast for cast. He eventually partnered with Bill Schaadt, a man almost universally regarded as the best fly fisher on the West Coast. Schaadt was a sign painter who fished every single day of the autumn and winter season, and anglers held him in awe. He became a kind of father figure to Chatham.
It was a remarkable time in the history of California coastal f ly fishing. Schaadt’s gang discovered a fabulous king salmon fishery on the Smith and Chetco Rivers in the northern redwood country, and they pioneered fly fishing for striped bass out on San Francisco Bay. Their world-record catches were routinely being reported in Field and Stream.
The only problem was that Chatham couldn’t make a living. He struggled to survive on a string of low-wage menial jobs. He labored at the easel, but rarely sold a painting, despite a few gallery exhibitions. Rising rents pushed him ever westward into boondocks towns such as Nicasio, Bolinas, and Marshall. At one point, he was living out of a camper truck. He figured he’d be poor all his life.
“Confusion and loneliness became frequent demons, and I was troubled by the question of whether or not there was place for me in the world,” Chatham wrote in One Hundred Paintings. “I had no notion of earning money by being a painter, or of anything other than being a person compelled to fish all the time.”
And then he met a budding novelist named Tom McGuane. The year was 1967. San Francisco was in the midst of the hippie flowering. Thomas McGuane was a long-haired rebel from Michigan studying at Stanford on a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship, and he was as crazy for fly fishing as he was for fiction. So when McGuane heard that some guy over in Bolinas named Russell Chatham had caught a world-record thirty-sixpound, six-ounce striped bass on a fly rod in San Francisco Bay, he made a beeline for that coastal hamlet.
The two sportsmen hit it off. McGuane was already a master of woodland Michigan trout streams, but this coastal fishing was a whole different world. Trout fishing calls for delicacy and nuance. This was more like guerrilla warfare. Deep wading, long-distance casts, high line speeds. The pressure was on in pools where the lineups were as competitive and hierarchical as California surf breaks. These were apex anglers, and McGuane could see that Chatham was one of the alpha dogs. Russ showed Tom how to catch sea-run fish.
By example, McGuane showed Chatham how to make a living. The painter discovered he could get paid for writing about his fishing adventures. And so Russ began freelancing stories for small fishing magazines. He was a natural. His stories were humorous, authoritative, and often exquisitely written. Soon he was contributing to Esquire and Sports Illustrated. Those magazines paid well and sent authors to exotic locations on fat expense accounts. When Chatham went to Key West to fish for tarpon in 1970, McGuane introduced him down there to Jim Harrison, an old college friend from Michigan. Harrison was a poet whose financial prospects at the time appeared as dim as Chatham’s. Another lifelong friendship was formed.
The next year, McGuane invited Chatham to join him and Harrison in Montana for some trout fishing. The novelist had purchased a small ranch near a cattle-and-railroad town called Livingston after selling film rights to his first book, The Sporting Club. Chatham found in Montana all the space, beauty, and hunting and fishing he could ever want — and at prices he could afford. The truth was, he could no longer make the rent even in rural Marin. And in any case, California’s coastal fishery had all but disappeared. The salmon and steelhead runs had collapsed on the Russian River after the construction of Warm Spring Dam on Dry Creek, a major spawning tributary for steelhead and cohos, and the anadromous runs on the Gualala, Eel, Klamath, and Trinity had been in serious decline for years due to logging and other ecological ravages. Those rivers would never be the same again.
In the spring of 1972, Russ moved to Paradise Valley near Livingston with his second wife, Mary Fanning, and baby daughter Lea. They took up residence in an old ranch house on six hundred acres of vacant land bordering a protected wilderness. Their homestead was at the end of a dirt road. Tom McGuane was a neighbor. Deep Creek flowed through the property, a tributary of the Yellowstone River three miles downstream. The rent for a full year was only five hundred dollars. The ninetynine-year lease was closed on a handshake deal. Chatham figured he could get by on his freelance writing, and he wouldn’t starve as long as he had a shotgun, fly rod, and garden. But it was tough going, and for a time, he lived by the barter system. The artist swapped paintings for medical services, rods and guns, automotive repairs, veterinary bills, firewood, and babysitting services. To this day, many Chatham paintings are hanging in dens and living rooms all throughout Livingston. Mainly he lived on the income from fishing and hunting stories.
As a painter he was having a hard time adjusting to the vastness of the landscape. He couldn’t get a handle on the snowcapped mountains and valleys. California had been warm and intimate; Montana was “wide-open and tall,” and the winters were colorless. “The California hills were sensuous,” he explained. “They’re like nudes in the way they roll and curve. Here they’re angular, cold, distant, even hostile.” So he continued to paint California’s golden hills from memory, and he kept a studio in San Anselmo and f led to California to escape Montana’s winters.
But Paradise Valley truly lived up to its name. There was fabulous trout fishing in the Yellowstone River and on nearby Armstrong, Nelson, and DePuys spring creeks. And he hunted grouse and partridges on the ridges, and ducks and geese in the river bottoms.
There was quite a scene in town, too — one he and McGuane helped to create. Their author friends Richard Brautigan (Trout Fishing in America) and William “Gatz” Hjortsberg (Falling Angel) had moved there from Bolinas, buying homes on Pine Creek, a lovely little tributary of the Yellowstone. Each autumn, Jim Harrison drove out from Michigan for the trout fishing, and the “Montana Gang,” as they came to be known, attracted other artists and writers to Paradise Valley, which was becoming as famous for its hip glamour as for its scenery. Movies such as Rancho Deluxe, The Missouri Breaks, and Tom Horn were being filmed on location there from screenplays written by McGuane. Actors such as Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda, and Warren Oates were buying homes in the valley. These sportsmen and artists formed deep and lasting friendships, raised families together, and boosted each other’s morale and budding careers.
It was a time of frenetic creativity and heavy partying. The antics of the Montana Gang were becoming widely known. The party moved back and forth between Livingston and Key West, drawing Jimmy Buffett and Hunter S. Thompson into its vortex. This period of heavy drinking, cheerful gunplay, and musical beds was dutifully chronicled in newspapers and gossip columns and much later on in Jubilee Hitchhiker, a magisterial biography of Richard Brautigan written by his friend Gatz Hjortsberg. Also in the pages of Mile Marker Zero: The Moveable Feast of Key West, a rather low-rent book written by William McKeen, but great fun to read.
With Hollywood money in town, Chatham’s financial prospects started looking up. Jack Nicholson dug his paintings. The actor came to Livingston to film The Missouri Breaks and was hanging out with McGuane and Jim Harrison. Jack noticed a landscape painting on McGuane’s wall that he particularly liked and he asked who the artist was. Tom gave him Chatham’s phone number. When word got out that Jack Nicholson, a serious art collector, was a true fan, Chatham soon became a favorite of other celebrity collectors, such as Robert Redford, Harrison Ford, and Jessica Lange. And by this time, he had solved his Montana problem.
“I wrote a fishing book, The Angler’s Coast, and I sent it to a friend I grew up with who worked at Doubleday, and she sent it to her boss,” said Chatham in a conversation with his friend, the newspaper publisher Will Hearst, in what was to be the last published interview the artist gave. “I didn’t know his title, maybe he was the head honcho, but he loved to fish, and he said, ‘Tell Russ I would like him to come to New York.’ I’d never been on an airplane, I’d never been anywhere, but I went to New York. I met with him in his office. And we hung out, and he bought the book instantly, in five minutes.
“This was the first time I ever went to the Met, and I went to the Frick, and I went to all the New York museums. I was there for probably two weeks. I jumped on a shuttle and went to Washington, D.C., which in a very short period of time let me see the Smithsonian and the National Gallery. It was the first time in my life that I’d ever seen any of those paintings in the flesh. And it changed my life. So when I came back to Montana, I saw everything with new eyes and started to figure out how to work with Montana.”
California’s hills of burnished gold became the cold and low light of the Absaroka Mountains. He had always painted in warm earth tones. Heat shimmered up from his California canvases. His Montana landscapes came to be rendered in fading light and changing weather. He could paint the air, the fog, the gathering rainfall. His canvases were “dreamy and real, rich and spare, warm and shivery, quiet yet intense, joyful yet sometimes foreboding,” wrote Jordan Rane in “Russell Chatham’s Window to the West” in Cowboys and Indians magazine. Chatham’s brushwork was like calligraphy tracing lines of energy. These could have been Chinese landscape paintings. The effect was emotion in a sea of calm. He painted his feelings as much as he painted the land. His art had less to do with rendering realistic depictions than with finding a way to see things by weaving consciousness and nature together. “Much of this,” Chatham once said, “has to do with the belief that there is an enormous unseen force in the universe which can neither be understood nor explained, not by science, and not by the great religions.”
As his reputation grew, his army of private collectors expanded beyond Hollywood to include authors such as Peter Matthiessen, James Crumley, Richard Ford, Philip Caputo, Rick Bass, Hunter S. Thompson, and Carl Hiaasen. Chatham’s paintings began appearing on the dust jackets of Jim Harrison’s novels and novellas. His artwork also attracted major figures in the world of journalism and publishing, including Jann Wenner, Seymour Lawrence, Tom Brokaw, David Halberstam, Ed Bradley, Morley Safer, and Charles Kuralt. Time’s art critic, Robert Hughes, owned a Chatham, and entrepreneurs such as Yvon Chouinard, Paul Allen, and Tom Siebel sought out his work. Other luminaries in the entertainment world who were buying Chathams included Margot Kidder, Jane Fonda, Jamie Lee Curtis, Angelica Huston, Harry Dean Stanton, Rip Torn, Don Henley and Glen Frye, Jimmy Buffett, Dennis and Randy Quaid, Robert Wagner, Jill St. John, Ali MacGraw, Meg Ryan, and Warren Beatty.
The artist was profiled in newspapers and magazines, and Chatham was even featured in one of Charles Kuralt’s “On the Road” segments for CBS Sunday Morning. In all, Chatham would clock in four hundred one-man exhibitions in museums and galleries over five decades. As prices for his oil paintings soared, along with the multiyear wait for commissions, Chatham turned to lithography to fill the growing demand for his work and to make his art more financially accessible to the larger public.
The modern process of lithography usually starts with a photograph and uses only about three or four colors. Chatham’s are different and start with sketches. Beginning in the early 1980s and working with a finearts printer in Seattle, Chatham began transforming the process by devising a way of layering up to forty or fifty different colors, each inking drawn by hand onto plates to achieve the subtle shadings and muted tones of his final prints. The results were as haunting and beautiful as his oil paintings. His limited-edition printings of multiple originals sold out quickly for between two hundred and fifty and five hundred dollars each, and Chatham came to be regarded as one of the foremost lithographers in the land.
Discouraged by the state of mainstream book publishing, and wanting to bring his fishing stories back into print, as well as bring out volumes highlighting his paintings, he started Clark City Press, a Montana-based publishing house. In addition to printing The Angler’s Coast, Dark Waters, and Silent Seasons in deluxe editions, Clark City Press also produced three books about his oil painting and lithography: Russell Chatham, One Hundred Paintings, and The Missouri Headwaters. Garnering much critical acclaim, Clark City Press went on to publish thirty-two books of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, art, and photography before the publishing house went dormant. Hungry for something to eat, he opened Chatham’s Livingston Bar and Grille, a high-end steakhouse that soon became known as the finest restaurant in Montana. Chatham had epicurean tastes in food and wine, and he had a gargantuan appetite for fun. People still talk about his story “The Great Duck Misunderstanding,” a tale of Rabelaisian excess that was originally published in Gray’s Sporting Journal and later republished in Esquire. In that story, the author’s unchecked libido meets its match when pitted against a chance to enjoy an orgiastic dinner of wild ducks. It might be the most hedonistic food essay ever written. A similar pair of essays, “Eating Around” and “Into the Country, Out of Your Head,” republished in Dark Waters, further cemented his reputation as one of the people your parents warned you about. But somehow the serious work got done amid all the sport and tomfoolery. The Montana Gang that once raised hell settled down and raised kids and somehow became respectable. The arc of their lives followed a predictable trajectory. It’s funny how given enough time, wild young rebels become our wise village elders.
Chatham made enough money to buy Key West, but he burned through most of it. He circled the globe two dozen times in pursuit of game fish in Iceland, Alaska, British Columbia, Russia, Mexico, and Central and South America. He toured the great cultural capitals of the world to visit their art museums. He gave away heaps of money to charities and conservation causes. He had no head for business and even less for accounting, and he got into big trouble with the IRS. At one point, it looked like he might even be headed to prison.
Foolishly, he went on a speculative binge, sinking all his money into Montana real estate. When land values tanked in the 2008 recession, he was wiped out. With the banks foreclosing on him, he closed his gallery in Livingston in 2011 and after forty years of living in Montana left his home in the Rockies for good.
He wound up back where he began. He returned to Marin and to his roots as a California painter and fisherman. He had come back to the very epicenter of his relationship with the natural world. To the slough on Lagunitas Creek. To the alpha and omega of his monogram. He rented a studio in tiny Marshall on Tomales Bay and lodged himself in a farmhouse in the hills.
“My sole possessions in this world are ten gray T-shirts and a pair of overalls,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. He said he was at peace. “I’m very comfortable with these old motifs that I grew up with.” So he went back to work in typical Chatham fashion. He painted himself out of his corner. He settled the IRS beef. He kept a set of fly rods in his studio and would fish for striped bass in between sessions with the paintbrush and easel. He was writing a memoir about fly fishing on San Francisco Bay. He called it Tide, Wind, and Fog.
But his body was failing him, and age-related diseases had him in and out of hospitals. In recent times, he had been living in a house in Point Reyes Station. He had big plans to open a gallery there. He wanted to finish his memoir. He planned a big interview with California Fly Fisher to discuss his life and art. But it was not to be. He was fading. He painted until he was no longer able to do so. He wrote daily until that, too, became impossible. He could no longer care for himself at home, and so he went to live in a memory-care facility on the Peninsula. There he died on November 10 of last year, surrounded by family and friends.
His artistic credo couldn’t have been more straightforward. He told The Bloomsbury Review: “All genuine art grows outward from the heart, and is a matter of sensations. Art inspired primarily by the intellect may induce awe, excitement and even laughter, but never tears, and there is no great art without tears.” And he wrote in Big Sky Journal: “The artist does not simply hold a mirror up to society. If the world is greedy, the artist must be generous. If there is war and hate, he must be peaceful and loving. If the world is insane, he must offer sanity, and if the world is becoming a void, he must fill it with his soul.”
Russell Chatham filled our world.
