(majestic music) - [Announcer] This program was made possible in part by the greater Montana Foundation, the Burton K. Wheeler Center, and support from viewers like you.

(majestic music) (classical music) - [Russell] It seems like the things that I do, like hunting, fishing, and painting are all things that I started doing as a kid.

They're things that my family did.

My father loved to duck, his father loved to duck hunt.

So, you know, it was just something that was started early on.

(water lapping) This is an incredibly lovely time of day.

I think maybe one of the reasons that it appears a lot in the studio paintings is because all the studio paintings are done from memory, and I remember this the best.

(grass crunching) (wind howling) (people chattering) - I go to all the Chatham openings whenever I can, wherever they may be.

Why?

Oh, because the company is the best, and so is the art.

And um, Because I like to fantasize about the escalating values of the paintings I got for a load of firewood all these many decades ago.

- The purchases that you make, the value of them just to be able to look at them every day, to wake up and have these images surround you, is an important part of my life, I think.

It's important that his paintings give you a sense of longing.

I guess, if you have the combination of getting that sense of longing, and that little particular space that you can get into in the paintings, I would have to say that he knows what he's painting because it seems to be the answer to why I'm attracted to it.

- He has a long abiding bud of a tradition or a notion of beauty that goes beyond just the mere fadism.

He cares nothing about what's "hip" quote, unquote, or what's of the moment in art news.

He only cares about what he learned from his grandfather who came from another more ancient, tradition.

- [Russell] The people who are, to me, have always done the best work are the people who never forget what went before and who always in all their work take into full account the entire history of everything they know about the art that they're involved in.

And they rely on it very heavily for form and for stability, but they don't imitate it.

In that sense, those people in my mind become the real avant garde, people who rely on the oldest information they have.

(brush scratching) - I think the 20th century is a particularly barren age.

I mean, it's really a wacky time.

I mean, it's an age, at least in the arts, where all the rules fell down, and then like anything is art now.

I mean, Klaus Oldenburg said, "Art is anything you can get away with."

And consequently, you have great piles of discarded rubber tires in the lobby of the Guggenheim and that's art.

- So we got a situation where you have two things happening.

You have academic art, which is the art the American museums sponsor.

And then you have another kind of art, which is practiced by sort of Backwoods people like me sitting out in the middle of nowhere who are just kind of trying to (gentle folk music) be good enough for the old artists.

And trying to do something along the lines of what they tried to do without being terribly concerned about being officially recognized.

It's an extraordinarily soulful place.

As a child growing up in that part of California, it's very hard to people for people to understand it now, but it was rural just like Montana is.

It was actually my great-great-grandfather who left Switzerland and went to the gold rush in Australia.

And he found gold.

He took it and he went to California, and he divided the ranch that he bought with the gold he brought from Australia into four ranches.

One for each of the four sons.

And they were farmers, and they made cheese.

Well, I responded to my grandfather's work probably genetically.

I mean, you really could say that I was born to be a painter, whereas my brothers and sisters weren't.

When I first started painting, at the age of seven or eight years old, I was not consciously influenced by his painting.

I mean, because they gave us paints, and we sat outside and painted.

And, as kids, we basically just responded to what we were seeing.

And as I grew older, my mother's sister was an artist, and her husband was an artist and a musician, spoke about him very reverentially all during my teenage years when I was painting.

And so I began to get the drift that he was widely respected and that there had to be a reason.

And so, as I got into be a late teenager in my 20s I was very consciously influenced by his work.

And it took many, many years for that influence to become distilled to where I could add my own voice to it.

But my grandfather's wife had a brother, his name was Maurice Del Mue, and he was a very, an immensely successful commercial artist.

He was slick.

I had an opportunity to really look at Maurice's paintings and to talk to him and hear what he had to say.

As he helped me with other things.

And so I had developed a real understanding of what the differences were between my grandfather's work and Maurice's work.

Because one was patently commercial.

The other was pure great art.

(birds chirping) (lure whooshing) The obsession started for me maybe 45 years ago during a time now largely forgotten and in a place which even then existed well outside its own time.

This exquisite land was the crucible in which my genes blended with the environment to form the person I have become.

Earlier on we were taught to feel, acknowledge, and respect the very real presence of the spirits of our ancestors.

We learned to use our imaginations to walk alone in the Hills and canyons, to hunt, to paint, and to fish.

One day, my father decided I was old enough to go along fishing with him.

When I reached the place my father wanted to try, he made me sit down, back away from the creek while he looked for bait.

The yellow jacket cruised by and he stunned ut with his hat and impaled it on the hook.

My father leaned very slowly forward, cautiously lowering his bait.

Within seconds he was lifting furiously, sending his trough into the air toward me.

He turn and grabbed it, snapped it on the head with a stick and put it in the skiff.

He caught two or three more than said that was enough.

He motioned me to come over to where he knelt behind the shrub he used for concealment.

"I'll hold it," he said.

"You could look down and see them."

He slowly leaned me out over the hull.

The remaining six or seven fish died about several rushing under the waterfall.

And seeing my father held me there for a long time because it's one of the clearest images I have from my early childhood.

My father, who I loved so much, hovered there as if time had stopped.

What did the little boy see down there, which enthralled him so?

Was it a mirror through which he similar sense the shape of this whole night?

It wasn't that he daily perceived a cosmic mystery lives for one split second in a delicate vanishing element.

What was it about this insignificant place?

Which forge such a longing that no matter how wide a circle the boy turned in traveling, he was barely received in return.

(birds chirping) You know, I tried writing a few fishing stories when I was 11, 12, 13 years old, but those were not obviously not serious efforts.

It didn't lead to anything.

I did so much fishing during the late during the late fifties, all through the sixties, and the early seventies and during the late sixties after I caught a world record fish, I thought, well, if I could if I learn to write, and if I could break in and I could use this actual event, which was a which was a real event of some importance to write about that event to get a start.

Well, that's what I did.

And it just so happened in California during the late sixties I met Tom McGuane and William Wurzburg and they moved to this little town called Belina's just North of San Francisco on the coast.

And they liked to fish.

- That's what I remember.

He came to me one day and he said, dude, Gatz do you know that?

Cause we were avid fisherman.

He said, do you know that the man that holds the world's record striped bass on a fly lives here in Belina's and his name is Russell Chatham.

And so in his studio one night there was like a potluck open house meeting organizational meeting for the peace and freedom party.

And that's when I discovered who Russell Chatham was.

- And I was curious and I started meeting their friends who were writers and reading things that they recommended and kind of got back into the habit of reading.

And I, and at the same time, I, you know well maybe I can start to try to write something.

- We started going fishing together and hanging out.

(water gushing) - For some reason Richard Brautigan, I was very good friends with Richard.

He was extremely encouraging and I've never really understood why, he was always saying you know, you can do this, keep, keep, keep at it.

The more you do it, the better you get.

So that's all there is to it.

That's what it takes.

And so one thing kind of led to another and I was able to actually make a living all through the seventies by writing.

And it was, but it started simply because I had a certain cache as a fisherman (water gushing) basically left California because I could see what was happening there.

And California had with each passing year each passing month, the crowds got thicker and the cost of living went up so that it was totally beyond my means even to rent a house anymore.

I mean, the sad truth is if, if I had my choice I'd rather live in California, but I, but only if it was the way it was 50 years ago and that's impossible.

So I, I found up here the sense of of freedom and space that used to be in California.

Tom McGuane had a ranch just down the road here about a mile and came up in the fall of 1971 and with a mutual friend of ours named Rudy Ferris we stayed up here about a month at McGuane's down there, fishing and so forth.

And he happened to mention that that this place was here and that it was vacant and that the owner was looking for a tenant.

So I drove up here and looked the place over and just absolutely loved it, thought, well, this is it.

At that time, my wife Mary was pregnant with our daughter Lea.

Lea was born the end of January.

And then in April we just piled everything we had into this truck and uh... headed out four days later, we arrived here.

Well, when we first arrived here, it was um, the house needed a lot of work and so forth.

And we, you know, we had absolutely no money and it was almost impossible to procure enough firewood to make it through winter.

I mean, basically with the old fashioned stove that we had here I figured it took a pile of fire with exactly the same size as the house to get through winter.

Might've been easier just to burn the house down.

You can't overemphasize enough how important it was that it was cheap to live here.

And that was essential because I had made up my mind that if I didn't devote myself entirely to painting and writing and quit taking jobs, you know part-time jobs doing this and that.

And the other thing that I was never going to be able to paint and write because I'd never be able to develop it, never get anywhere with it.

It required full, full attention.

As I said, I didn't come here specifically to paint Montana landscapes.

I knew I was going to paint, but I hadn't I guess I really hadn't thought it over as to how different the landscape in Montana was going to be from the landscape in California.

And the most obvious feature of the landscape in Montana is distance.

And when I look up into these mountain peaks are right above the house.

You can't really see them from here, but over on pine Creek you know, they're very, you know, very, it is very hostile.

I don't want to be there.

I do not want to be there.

I don't like it up there.

And so it's very hard for me to paint a picture of that because in order for me to paint a picture of it I have to place myself in the spot where the brush wherever the brush hits the canvas, that's where I am.

You know, I have to be able to feel that I could walk through there and that I know what it's like to be under those trees or back against those hills or on those fields and so forth.

I have a sympathy for it.

- It was nice to have a friend who worked in a medium, you know, it was completely different than what I was doing, but that meant so much to me.

And that I could see the dedication and no matter how tough work was going, I could imagine, well Russell's up off with his easel somewhere.

You know, I just know that the Russell's out there struggling with it too.

- I mean, I don't remember one time he's speeding down the road came to a halt, screeching halt, literally and, just as I was driving up I could hear him squealing and he was drying on the front of his car and I said, what are you doing?

And he said, I finally found the luck.

- And even now 20 years later in the last few years it's the first time I was starting to try to open up and deal with some of these broader, larger ideas.

(water gushing) Like the matter of balance as I say, to be too poor.

Yeah.

Is a hindrance to your work in, in many ways because then too much of your energies goes into worrying about, you know, where are you going to get the nickel to buy tomorrow's bowl of gruel, you know and you shouldn't be worried about stuff like that.

You know, life should have more fullness to it.

- I mean, Livingston in those days was a was a blue collar town, you know with railroad workers and ranchers and of wacky artists that happened to live in and around the area who, who just had it as, as a playground there would be a gathering of all these folks from from key West and Michigan and New York and California and everyone would come out, you know, live at Russell's or live at Tom's or live at my place or stay with Richard Brautigan.

And there'd just be, it was like a moveable feast.

- All we did is laugh.

It seemed all day long.

- [Russel] So that was taken, I believe it was the summer of 1981.

And I put together a huge exhibit.

So there were about a hundred paintings on view here.

A reporter was out here for a month from people magazine and the photographer kind of doing a story on the area then in the story kind of ended up to the focus on me because of this event.

- Shows were exceptional.

And of course, I mean, everything was sold before it ever was hung really because we all couldn't wait to buy something.

I had to have this particular painting of Russel's just had to, it was so poignant.

It was a shrub or a Bush in the snow.

It just made my heart race when I saw it.

And you know, that was 30, some years ago.

Still moves me just as much.

- And, you know, I feel a lot just in general the way Russell's paintings tend to make people feel.

I mean, there's a kind of wistful sadness yet.

There's this really, this eternal sense of beauty.

And there's a kind of abiding hope in them, always no matter how gray or, you know there's always a kind of little breakthrough of color.

The last moment of sun gleaming through a gray cloud.

- Russell finding in a haystack What is magnificent about a haystack.

or the river way off in the distance?

It's sort of a pink light And you did see it maybe six o'clock, four years back, and then suddenly there were you at all times.

You see, it just gives me a great deal of peace and happiness.

- They're not only graphic statement, physical beauty but they're like a philosophical statement about an attitude towards life itself.

- A printmaking is, is primarily so different from painting because paintings direct and printmaking involves steps postpone gratification.

I started in early in the eighties, a publisher convinced me to give it a try, see, see what I do.

And so I kept at it, I kept doing it.

Result of that is, that I put in enormous hours making prints, after doing it for a few years and developing an audience for it so people were buying it.

It put me in a normal income bracket.

(techno music) - Concept is the same as a piece of sculpture that you cast it is if you make work.

And what that does is it makes the price of the individual pictures go down.

In fact, this year I think I will do a free run this year got a whole stack of them, put them by the door and say, take, and you really have something for everybody.

- I mean basically feel that art should be free.

I've really always operated outside the establishment you know, right from the beginning, at the beginning it was not entirely by choice, but it is now.

And so the idea of having my own commercial gallery you know, and my own non-commercial nonprofit museum might seem to be somewhat of a contradiction but I think probably they're not.

The commercial gallery is how you make your living.

And critics only attend only go into galleries, certain galleries.

They don't treat all galleries equally.

So in fact, it's the people who are really holding the leash are the businessmen the art dealers, it's the art dealers who are telling the critics what's okay and what's not okay.

So it's totally money driven the whole thing.

And that's why it's bad.

You know what I'm doing may or may not work well to counter that.

I really can't say it's just that I choose not to be a part of that world.

It's not, it doesn't feel good.

It feels, feels misdirected to me.

It feels unimportant and it feels shallow.

So I avoid it.

(wind howling) When you talk about the spirituality of nature of animals and birds, I mean, you look at that you have to look at what the native people how the native people viewed it.

You know, what did the Indians think about this (wind howling) (gunshot sound) a deer or a bird or an Eagle or any animal and fish was all part of the great spirit.

It was all ceremony and it was all, it was all done with with a great amount of apology and respect.

And that's, that's basically how I view nature.

You know, as part of it, you know you starting to talk about religion, you know what's the spirit of religion, you know it's all this somehow, you know (birds chirping) I'm basically carrying on a tradition.

That's a, it's a tradition in my family.

It's a tradition in humanity.

And frankly, it means a lot to me to eat what I kill.

I would never kill anything that I wouldn't eat.

- I don't kill any fish.

We used to kill everything years ago.

I've killed more wild steelhead than probably live in Washington state.

And I guess that's what, that's what we did.

You know, we never, we never heard of letting anything go.

You caught as many as you could and you took them all home.

And if you couldn't use them, you gave them away.

We didn't have the understanding of how much damage has been done.

And now we do.

The catch and release is as a gesture that each fishermen now has to make in order to have his pastime and vibe.

(nature sounds) I know of a little spring Creek with an unfamiliar name far from the inner interstate.

It is not built in the governor's letter to potential visitors as blue ribbon or yellow ribbon or ribbon anything.

This summer, I plan on taking my three-year-old son Paul, to a particular little pool that I like if he could hold still long enough something in question maybe I can hold him so he can watch the trout in it.

Who knows what he'll see, maybe nothing.

The deadly moronic television said having already impacted his synopsis and impaired his ability to perceive or maybe the real spirit of the earth will liven in for him.

And he'll glimpse to the future.

- I think that people have a mistaken idea that artists start out at the beginning of their life with a plan.

I don't think that that a Rembrandt or Velasquez or Goya had the faintest idea what they were going to do.

It just if they, because they constructed their own lives as that life unfolded, but you go back in hindsight and learn in our history that this artist went from point A to point Z in his life.

The implication is that he planned it that way.

And I don't think that's true.

I think that it's all made up day by day, week by week, month by month.

And so my, my game plan is Very simply stated is to try to paint a good painting.

And that's what I do.

Every time I sit down, I said, maybe this will be the one.

Maybe this will be the good one.

(classical music) (majestic music) Montana in the second century was made possible in part by the greater Montana foundation the Burton Kay Wheeler center and support from viewers like you.