Tenkara and Fly Fishing

One of my new years resolutions in 2010 is to get back to making art. For various reasons, I haven’t made any art to speak of for about 10 years. It is hard for me to even look at certain paintings without the urge to break out the paint.

I guess certain minds are on the same wavelength. When I look at the work of artists like Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Esteban Vicente and Jackson Pollock, I just get it. I feel it. Their art resonates with me and I understand it in a non-verbal way. It makes me want to paint.

So I’ve pretty much avoided looking art by these folks for the last decade or so. I went through a phase when I took this inspiration and made my own art. I tried to communicate in the same visual vernacular established by these other artists. And I created some works that, I think were successful in a small way, at this same type of expression. Though, in no way do I claim to be an artist in the same way that those giants were.

Well, lately the obsession has been fly fishing and fly tying.  I have never done much to bring the art and the fly fishing together.  I just never felt like I could do it in an honest way.  I’m not a painter of bucolic landscapes or hyper-realistic fish (though I greatly respect and am in awe of some of those fish painters).   When I saw Derek De Young’s fish paintings though something clicked.  These were images that weren’t afraid to be full of saturated colors and painterly gesture.   I found myself wishing that I had thought of this (and had the talent to actually pull it off).  Check out his painting gallery at website canvasfish.com.

Well that is a long intro to present the first piece of fly fishing related art that I’ve produced this year as a part of my New Years Resolution.  Hopefully someday I’ll actually get real materials out, but for now I’m content sketching on the iPod touch using the app Autodesk SketchBook Mobile.  It’s an awesome little app that’s actually a pretty powerful tool.  I can recommend it to any iPod or iPhone users that want a drawing program.  It is well worth the $2.99 that it costs.  Check out the Flickr group to see some other work that people are doing with their iPod and SketchBook Mobile.  Well here it is…