To me, fly fishing isn’t about the fish, it’s about the fly. Imitating beating wings on water, stillborns and cripples caught in the film, swimming leeches, wounded minnows, iridescent colors of green to blue, copper to gold, silver to pearl — all put together, not just to fool fish, but to please the eye of the fisher. Like in life, no two flies are alike, nor are the imitations we create. I hope you find my renderings pleasing to your eyes.
—Rodney Cloutier
Rodney Cloutier, like so many others, took a circuitous route to get to where he is today.
Being an army brat, he spent his early years on both coasts. His family then settled in Riverside, California, where he lived for 20 years.
Fishing and art were part of those years, although not merged, as they are for him today. Fishing mostly occurred on the Pacific Ocean, where his father took him and his brother to fish for flounders, mackerel, bonitos, halibut, sea bass, rockfish, barracudas, and an occasional shark.
Art was more encompassing in his life. As a youngster, he completed many paint-by-numbers kits. He thrived on art and photography classes in high school. At Riverside Community College, he soaked up art classes, intending to go to a four-year college with an art major. But lacking financial support, he took a job in the food industry, moving on to varied restaurant managerial positions. Both fishing and art were shelved for the time being.
In the late 1980s, tired of freeways, smog, and crowds, he moved to Redding, enticed by its natural surroundings, carting along an old fiberglass fly rod his brother had given him. With many prime freshwater angling opportunities now available, he began fishing with it, albeit with bait and lures. Then someone gave him a fly reel and line, and as he says, he “got hooked like a trout on a suicide grab!”
Through books, videos, and on-stream practice, Rodney frenetically began absorbing this challenging sport. He lacked fishing buddies until he learned about a local fly-fishing club — the Shasta Fly Fishers. He joined it and quickly immersed himself in fishing outings, companionship, and “tying bugs.” In short order, he became its president, a position he held for three years, because as he put it, “no one else wanted the job.”
In the early 1990s, the Shasta Fly Fishers produced a series of fly-fishing programs for the community TV channel. The host, longtime Shasta fly fisher Dick Johnson, asked Rodney if he could draw the flies shown being tied in the programs as a visual accompaniment. From that time forward, Rodney has never tired of bringing artificial flies to life with his colored pencils and ink — imitations of imitations. Rodney today teaches many junior and intermediate fly-tying classes at varied venues. He has been a featured tyer and artist at the Fly Tying Expo held at Redding’s Turtle Bay Exploration Park each winter. He fishes whenever he can, his favorite water being the lower Sacramento right in Redding, where he still lives.
Beyond his fly renderings, Rodney sometimes creates “fish art,” which usually presents a unique take on this sport. He also draws images for signs, posters, logos, shirts, and the like. But it is the world of artificial bugs, spun with thread, wire, feathers, fur, hair, plastic legs, and even wiggly eyes that continue to inspire him to replicate these imitations through his own set of lenses.
