Russel chatham- Gone fishing - edited version

My name is Russell Chatham and my job is to paint pictures. By all accounts, perhaps a pretty odd occupation. It's not a job in the traditional sense, one which I started out having other artists in the family painting when I was like seven, eight years old, but it is what I suppose you'd have to say I was born to do. And so I didn't have a choice. I didn't choose it. It chose me. A tremendous amount of natural ability. I mean, he could draw beautifully. He was very, he was very sensitive. I mean, he, you know, he, he, his, he, his degree in Stanford was in literature, you know, and he could, he could memorize vast amounts of poetry and all this, these things. And he was, but his, his spirit was completely broken by, by his own father, who was a very harsh, really harsh, robber baron type of businessman, lumber business. And they, so they sent him off to, he was kind of frail, you know, and they sent him off to live on this ranch in Northern California to try to make a man out of him. And, and he, he just succumbed. I mean, he, you know, he, he liked that, but then he went back and he just took this flunky position in this, in this business where he sat at a calculator all day, every day, adding and subtracting numbers and, you know, drank himself to death. And so it's, it's, it's a terrible story. It's a sad story. On the other hand, on my mother's side, which is, which is the Piazzolla, my father was English, Chatham, the first Earl of Chatham, William Pitt. So, you know, and, and on my mother's side, they were Swiss Italian peasants, which is why I'm comfortable sleeping under a trestle and going to dinner in a castle. So, but my, on my mother's side, my grandfather came, was born in Switzerland, came to America in about 1886, probably one of the early travelers on the transcontinental railroad, by the way, when he was 14 years old. And his brother was also an artist who died very young. And, you know, he spent the rest of his life in San Francisco, in California, and that's where he did all his work. And it's, it's brilliant work. I mean, it's unlike anything that anyone else ever did. I mean, it's, you know, so I have the advantage of having been, come under the influence at an early age of someone who was truly a great artist. So growing up, we had his paintings in the house. There was, in not only my immediate family, but in my, amongst my aunts, uncles, cousins, and so forth, there was a general attitude in that art and artists mattered. And as I say, my grandfather was truly a great painter. And so that's what I saw growing up, was his paintings. And naturally, that affected me. And it was the single strongest influence in on me and in my work. So this is a really famous image of photograph of my grandfather by Ansel Adams. He's up on a scaffold that was built, especially for him to paint these murals that were in the San Francisco Public Library. They were installed in 1931 and 1932. And you can see the way the pictures lit, the skylight is right above, these things are like 10, 10 or 12 feet high. Very stylized. There are 10 panels, there was five called the land, which, which are pictured in here. And on the other wall was called the sea. And it was in one of his published portfolios. And it's a it's a fabulous photograph. And so years ago, I, after Ansel had passed away, and I actually knew Ansel too. I called the trust in California in Carmel. And I asked if they had a copy of this available. Because there were one or two portfolios. And this was one where somebody convinced Ansel to destroy the negative. So this is very, very rare. So I said, you wouldn't have a proof that you could possibly have for sale. And they said, Yeah, we do. We actually do have one. And I said, Well, that's fantastic. I said, Well, how much? How much would it cost? And the lady said, $10,000. I said, Well, that's, well, that's nice. But that's not gonna happen anytime soon. Well, some years later, I have a relationship with a with an art dealer in Ketchum, Idaho, John Braschowski. And he called me one day, and he said, Somebody brought this photograph of your grandfather in. And he said, he said, I thought maybe you'd like to have it. I said, John. Yeah, I'd like to have it. I said, I said, But I, I also happen to know what they're, what they're worth. And he said, Well, it doesn't matter. He says, I'm giving it to you anyway. So he packed it up and sent it to me. So it was quite a lovely gesture. So now this little sketchbox was a box that I used. When I did my very first painting, I was seven. However, it was it was one of my grandfather's sketchboxes. And he lived with us during the Second World War. And he normally lived with his, his younger daughter, and her husband, and they were, and he was doing the work for the army in Canada. So Papa came to live with us from about 1942 until, until the war was over. And so this was my Christmas present on my, my third Christmas. And it had, it had some kind of half used up tubes of paint in it, everything in it. My mother wouldn't let me touch it. I set it, I was sitting by my bed on a dresser, so I could see it every day. And, but I wasn't allowed to do anything with it until I took it to the ranch when I was seven. My cousin and I both did our first paintings on the same day. So I use this from the time, from that time, this is the sketchbox I took with me on my bike. And this is, you know, and I now have not used it for a number of years. I painted, this is a painting of the dairy building at the Piazzone Ranch. And I painted on the back of the box when I was about maybe 14, 15 years old, maybe, maybe, maybe younger. It's not, it's not dated or anything. But it's got a nice little thing for the turpentine that clips on. And it's got a, you know, I had just enough room in there for the standard palette that I use with the cadmium reds and cadmium yellows, cobalt blue and so forth. And so this, you know, it's one of the few material objects I have that really has some meaning to me in a world that's filled with material objects. So it's, it's, it's quite an artifact. You had three items before you drove a car. You had three items. Do you remember what they are? Three items. You told me. Before I drove a car, I had a fishing rod, I had a paint box, and I had a bike. That was your whole world, wasn't it? That was my world, yeah. Well, I mean, you know, if you stop and think about the average, average kids are after school or, you know, playing baseball or doing whatever, whatever they did, you know, I just took my bike and took, put the paint box, that little paint box there and the fishing rod and just took off. That's what I did. You know, I, that's what I did over and over every day, every day, every day. And having seen nothing but my grandfather's paintings, that's all I had to go on. And so a lot of my early work, you know, really so closely resembles his. It was a struggle for me to find out who I was. It was very difficult, in fact. And when I got a little, to be a little older, got to be a late teenager, for example, I had some mobility, had a car and could, could, could go around to museums or galleries and things and begin to see other things. I found that I was, I was affected by and became influenced by artists whose sensibility, you might say, was somewhat similar to my grandfather's. For example, there was an American painter named Albert Reiter that I had some affinity for, a very spiritual kind of thing. I love the work of James McNeill Whistler, particularly his, his landscapes, which were very soft and beautiful pictures. But it wasn't until I did not get to really start traveling until I was in my early 30s, the first time I ever got on an airplane and actually flew to New York City. And it was quite an experience. I'd never been out of California other than to drive to Montana. And I was 40 before I got to Europe. And, but once the, once the window began to open in my early 30s, and I saw, in New York, of course, you have, you know, several stupendous museums. You also are only minutes away from Washington, D.C., or from Boston, let's say. Go to Washington, now you've got the Smithsonian, the National Gallery, and so forth and so on. And so the window started to open for me and other influences started to come in. I began to see how big the world was, and how small I was. And, you know, it helped me to, it helped me to build on what I already, I already had a solid foundation that I got from my, thank God that my grandfather was a really solid, great painter. But this, getting out in the world allowed me to, to, to expand and see other possibilities. And all of that together really produced what I am today. If you, if you are a fisherman and you look at a river, what you're looking for is, you are looking for the places that are of interest to you as a fisherman, which is only about one percent of the river. The other 99 percent of the river doesn't have any fish in it. And a person who doesn't have that critical ability to critically choose, they call it reading it, reading the river, will just walk up to the bank and throw the line out anywhere and will not catch a fish. It's a little bit the same thing in choosing, in, for me, in landscape painting, is that the landscape is ubiquitous. It's all around us all the time, every day. There's, every time you turn your head, it's, the trick is, where's the, where's the kernel of the crux of something? Is it a, is it a moment during the day? Is it a moment in the morning? Is it a moment in the evening? Is it a certain something, something that is, is like a pinpoint focus? And when I see that somewhere, and I can see it any day, every, everything I, everywhere I go, everywhere, I'm always looking, always outside. And if, if, if there's a moment that crystallizes into something, as they said, there's something about that, I don't know what it is, but something about that, then I kind of take a picture of it in my mind. And when I come in here, you'll notice there are no windows in here. The last thing I want in a painting studio is a window, to be looking out the window and daydreaming. Now, what I have to do is, I have to take that, that picture that I took in my brain and somehow get it out through the ends of my fingers onto this canvas. And in so doing, I am going to, it is going to get transformed or warped through, through that whole process of coming in through the eyes and coming out through the fingers. And I'm going to try to recreate something of the essence of that kernel that I took a picture of. Now, I'm not really copying anything. I mean, I'm making up, because a painting has forms and rhythms and lines and colors and design and all these things, which I'm going to invent. And, but I'm, I'm, I'm inventing it. My, my, my map is in my brain. There's that kernel of the thing that I saw. And I don't know how else to explain it. Now, generally speaking, you know, one of the things you have to remember is you've got a certain area that needs to be covered. So you have to kind of be aware of how much material you're going to need to do that. And so it's easier to mix. This is just, of course, going to be an absolute basic first step blocking in. And many, many moons of work will come after this. But you have to start somewhere. And I like to start fairly quickly. It's a little bit different than some other people do. Because I view, I view my enemy as being the blank canvas, just as I view a blank piece of paper, my enemy as a writer. So you got to get something on the canvas, even if it's wrong, it doesn't matter. One of the tremendous advantages of oil paint is that you can make corrections throughout the entire process. Very different, for example, than watercolor or in lithography. You put something on that paper. If you haven't thought it through first, you're doomed. You can't change it. But here, with oil paint, you can. And I actually credit, this is pretty odd, but this is true. I actually credit having read an essay about, not Sargent, but Thomas Gainsborough, who was a, who was a, an English portrait painter. The essay concerned itself with why, why were Gainsborough's portraits, which were just formal portraits, much like hundreds of other artists, why did they have more life than just the ordinary hack painting? And I read, he described his method, which, which was, he would have the model pose, and the canvas would be, let's just say, he's going to paint a life-size portrait of a person standing. He would, his goal was to block that in, in no more than two hours, as quickly as he could. The value of that was that there's no stiffness to it. It had looseness. It had spontaneity. Now, when he was done, what he did was, he, he went, dismissed the sitter. He would take his palette knife and scrape the paint, scrape everything off that he'd just done. Well, because the canvas has a texture, he left a ghost image on the canvas of the position of the arm, the face, and all that. Then he would come back in, have the sitter come back, you know, two, three days later, start to begin to add and refine details. So, it's a system that, that I, I, I saw the value of it, and so I use it. Traditionalists would be horrified by what I'm doing here, but I'm quite happy with it. You notice there's no attempt to, we're not, we're not, I'm only doing one thing now. We're not developing color. We're not developing spatial depth. We're only doing one thing, and that is, we're identifying the position, the two-dimensional position of objects, this way and this way. That's why this, this first procedure, it's very simple. They say that, that, that a painting is two percent inspiration and ninety-eight percent hard work, and I can, it's kind of exciting at this point, because it's just starting. I don't know what I'm going to do, but, and it won't get exciting again until the last few days, about a year from now. You know, it's very important that your heroes be strong, you know, and I see, I see a lot of times in the, if you want to call it that, in the artistic community, like in this little town, you know, people whose heroes are not strong, you know, they select somebody at random to be their hero, who's not a powerful, strong person, and so they're, they're, they're, they're kind of negatively impacting themselves by doing that, you know, and so, I mean, I, I was, I was just, you know, born under a star. Yeah, cool, all right, okay, well, that's that. That was a great lecture for today.