Bozeman News

Breaking Clear of Papa's Shadow

The Renaissance of Russell Chatham

By Todd Wilkinson, 7-05-06

Leaving his mark on contemporary American landscape painting, Russell Chatham makes peace with Gottardo Piazzoni and finds newfound euphoria in his native West.

By Todd Wilkinson

“This is not a painting my grandfather would have made." Russell Chatham intuits out loud as he assesses a finished scene in oil. He is absorbed in a tractor beam of self-examination as if looking into a dimly lit pool of water where he has been stalking an evasive monster rainbow trout.

For a few moments, he and I are alone in the empty dining room at Chatham’s Livingston Bar and Grille, the four-star restaurant he presided over until recently near the banks of the Yellowstone River. It is the middle of the afternoon, before the usual rush of fly fishermen and other patrons pour in. We are surrounded by several projector-lit digital reproductions of new paintings few Americans have ever seen.

More than 15 years have passed since Chatham’s last major public exhibition was staged to national acclaim by the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana. Since then, the artist has seemed, almost by reclusive design, to fade from view while pursuing his own quiet path along the corridors of his favorite trout streams and in the sanctuary of his windowless studio.

Although Chatham has shown few hints of slowing down both in his output of commissions delivered to collectors around the world, and in the power and impact of his brooding naturalistic landscapes, this last stretch of life has summoned a period of introspection about his own relationships, most notably the one between him and his, at times, tumultuous past.

Today one could argue that Chatham is in the midst of his own Renaissance. “Russell’s back. He has returned,” says one of Chatham’s gallery representatives, Kelli Uhl, in Livingston. “Those of us who have known him for awhile have not seen him this enthusiastic in years – not since the 1980’s.”

This summer a traveling show of Chatham lithographs is making its way through Montana, having already stopped for a month each in Colstrip, Chester, and Bozeman. Next, it’s headed to Lewistown, then Dillon. “There are those who might argue it’s a waste of time placing the exhibitions in such small towns,” the artist observes. “But when I attend the receptions, what I have universally found is an honesty, curiosity, and gratitude among the people which has all but disappeared from the lives of urban dwellers, and I find this unimaginably soul satisfying.”

Chatham also has re-opened his signature gallery, Chatham Fine Art, on Main Street in a magnificently remodeled space just a few doors down from his Livingston restaurant. Meanwhile, he is rapidly expanding the supply of affordable limited edition lithographs to eager galleries across the country. Anymore, original oil paintings are done only by special order, and with production as low as four or five a year, the waiting period is daunting.

The fact is Russell Chatham has been regarded as an American legend more than once in his life – first as a fly fisherman; secondly, as a painter then as author, publisher and restaurateur. If there should be a sixth phase of heroic existence waiting in the wings -- it’s an encore he acknowledges is likely to be his last -- he may finally be free of the invisible expectations which have haunted him for more than half a century.

Like the notable cast of famous characters – both full timers and passers-through – who joined Chatham in invading Paradise Valley three decades ago (among them writers Tom McGuane, William Hjortsberg, Jim Harrison, Richard Brautigan, Hunter S. Thompson; actors Peter Fonda, Jeff Bridges, Margot Kidder, Warren Oates, Jack Nicholson, Sam Waterston; director Sam Peckinpah; singer Jimmy Buffett, and a parade of others) – those still breathing are all, as bonafide senior citizens, swept up in their own mortal assessment about the firmament of eternal youth that once was.

Chatham isn't technically a Boomer but he shares with his close contemporaries the existential angst about growing older this generation now is reckoning with.

As Chatham and I chat in downtown Livingston, he presses his finger gently toward a fresh painting, over its spiraling rivulets of dry, textured oil; across his trademark signature of soothing horizontal tonal bands; and then he stops at a wispy blizzard of perfectly executed brushwork. These pockets of oozing abstraction – really, paintings within paintings – at once crystallize and then seem to disappear into the gorgeous Montana pastoral as we step back and ponder its grandness from a distance. Sotto voce, the 67-year-old modern American master with snowy white hair and a desperado mustache, confesses aloud: “No, this is not how Papa would have done it.”

Though his own fishing prose is considered high art in sporting literature, Chatham isn’t speaking of Hemingway. For the first time since he was a boy, he no longer answers to the legacy of one Gottardo Fidele Ponziano Piazzoni. Indeed from the moment we rendezvoused hours earlier, Russell has been trying to verbally communicate a silent visual language passed down to him by way of Old World honor, daily ritual, and genes. To the uninitiated, his “Papa” was Piazzoni, the vaunted grandfather, a Swiss-Italian immigrant and classically trained artist who at the turn of the 20th century was part of the inner pantheon of northern California mural and landscape painters.

Piazzoni (1872-1945) was the imposing buoyant patriarch of an extended artistic family that included Chatham’s great uncle through marriage, French-born Maurice Del Mue (1875-1955). Given the importance paid to painting, and the remarkably innate abilities leavened through classical training and hard-love discipline, Chatham’s clan was akin in its philosophies to a West Coast version of the Wyeths back along the Brandywine.

It was out of this inheritance of obligation that the previous ideology of Russell Chatham became catalyzed. Born in October, 1939, in San Francisco, Chatham came of age during the post-modern, beatnick heyday of the late 1950’s and early 1960’s on the Left Coast. He would spend a huge swath of those years fishing and painting on the Piazzoni Ranch in the Carmel Valley, and in the foothills of Marin County. By his own account, he was obsessed with escaping to water.

Everywhere he turned in his home province of California when it was still a far-less populated utopia, immediate family members had Piazzonis hanging on the walls. Piazzoni represented their pedigree and artistic birthright. Chatham had a sketch box handed to him at an age when most kids are learning to throw a baseball.

Tonal expression with a wand of bristles (or fly rod) is his way of venturing into the half light of dreams. To understand Chatham, the man, first requires reading the four points of indulgence on his compass of carnal pleasures. In addition to his notorious fondness for women, they are: painting, fishing, writing, epicurean exploration. Not always pursued in that order but often with encounters enveloped by all of the above.

“You must understand that 'Russell The Personality' is a wholly separate character from the life of Russell Chatham the painter, though at the same time they are inseparable,” says William Randolph Hearst III, one of Chatham’s closest friends. “No matter what he does, his adventure with it becomes larger than life. As good a painter as he is, Russell’s an equally wonderful storyteller and devoted friend, an absolutely superb fisherman who might be among the best on the planet, an intrepid restaurant owner, gourmet cook, wine aficionado, writer, boutique book publisher and general roustabout.”

The Guinness Book of Records does not reserve a category for “best fisherman” but Chatham earned his nomination young. Since childhood, angling has been a thing Chatham never did simply for fun. The act of stalking fresh and saltwater species has been known to devour his time and thoughts at the expense of friendships, three marriages, and even his work. His wizardry, which he’s used to ply waters around the globe, is near mythical. More importantly, the compulsive pursuit brought him together with some of his closest friends, a gang of young, brilliant hippies, each leaving their mark on a specific expressionary media.

While a father in his twenties, Chatham already held distinction for catching a world record, 36-pound eight-ounce striped bass on a fly rod. The widely publicized feat gave him cache in landing writing assignments with Sports Illustrated at a time when New York writer George Plimpton and others were creating a new modern adventure genre. Chatham ascended from that firmament to also be considered one of the truly multi-faceted outdoorsmen of the 20th century.

After meeting writers McGuane and Hjortsberg along the California coast in Bolinas, Chatham and pals, one by one, pulled up stakes and migrated to the cowboy interior of Montana, adopting Paradise Valley because the living was cheap and the backdrop inspiring. The main attractions for Chatham were the spring creeks and trout-filled bends of the Yellowstone River flowing through the dell. He would settle near Deep Creek in 1972, and never leave.

Fortunately, the same exquisite vistas which make for auspicious places to sling flies served even better as fodder for paintings. However, fishing did not pay the bills, so when short of cash, Chatham swapped paintings for cars, food, drink, anything else one can imagine.

Members of the holy fraternity of Paradise Valley bohemians who came to the foot of the Absarokas (and who also made migrations, a la Hemingway, to fish in Key West) prompted Esquire magazine to enviously proclaim Livingston one of the premier hubs for artistic men living large in the great back of the beyond. But no members of the wild bunch conveyed the aesthetic centrifugal force of place more potently than Chatham. His painting, the writer McGuane once said, gave them all a focal point.

Paradoxically, at the same time, Chatham sought liberation from the expectations of his past and plunged into the interior West half his lifetime ago, he could not escape the current of its gravitational force. Piazzoni had exhibited his work at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, as did Del Mue, and at the Paris Salon and the Museum of Modern Art. Chatham confronted the prodigal struggle known to anyone who has ever had a successful immediate ancestor.

Here is one of his surprising confessions: When he first moved to Montana, he found it hard to re-orient himself to an entirely different kind of geography. “It took a long time to see this country,” he says of the Northern Rockies and plains. “California is a very painterly, sensuous landscape but Montana is not. I came here with traditional tools – the same way my grandfather came to California with tools from Europe. It’s like taking your fly rod and reel to a new river. If you know how to fish, it becomes a matter of adapting to the water, reading it, getting to know the holes, and perfecting the touch. It took me a while to figure out the aesthetics of Montana.”

Chatham found his inaugural Montana winters to be unbearably harsh and ill-suited to indulging his sensibilities as a painter. In fact, for the first eight or nine years, he kept a winter studio in San Anselmo where he grew up, continuing to paint California motifs. Eventually, however, the vastness of his new home worked its way into his consciousness, and there began a succession of epiphanies which resulted in a flood of dreamily spare works, each new one resonating deeper within himself and his viewers than the last. Winter views, portrayed in his lithographs, were chilly yet solemnly tranquil; summer pastorals romantic but tinged with a slightly winsome melancholy; autumn vistas timelessly alluring, visceral, fleeting. Ever present for comparison was his grandfather’s influence.

Although a devout believer in color forming a passageway to truth, he nonetheless took his painting in his own muted direction, not always upbeat or sunny, but nailing the region’s sigh of perpetual longing. Indeed, Gottardo Piazzoni might have wondered, in the same kind of conversation N.C. could have had with Andrew Wyeth: “Russell, my grandson, why don’t you express the happiness for nature you feel inside?” In fact, Chatham was portraying what resided in his gut but he still unconsciously dwelled in the shadow of his grandfather.

Chatham’s approach to painting, having grown out of that of this grandfather, is impossible to pigeonhole with an “ism.” By his own admission, Piazzoni’s greatest influence was the Swiss painter Segantini. This is noticeable in the early work. Yet as he matured, Piazzoni established an approach which was his and his alone. Likewise, the influence of Piazzoni is easy to see in Chatham’s early work, but less so as he struggled to find his own voice. If one were to try and put into words what Chatham does, it could be said his paintings embody form, color, mass and atmosphere combined to stir the emotions.

“Most of the real artists have been backed into the corners of America,” he once said. “It turns out that the spirit of art is being kept alive by any number of what might best be called serious Sunday painters along with the so-called Regionalists, anyone in fact, in love with art itself for its own sake and not for whatever material rewards can be squeezed out of it.”

Montana, Chatham says, was being planted then with a different artistic flag from the one flown by Charlie Russell and the 19th century frontier barnstormers credited with creating the mythical West.

While he does not preach the virtues of the starving artist, Chatham is convinced that those who pursue a career in painting to become wealthy, famous, and powerful, are only destined to sell out their souls and be damned to unhappiness. Of course, he is well aware that he’s benefited mightily from the cosmic koan which is that by eschewing the limelight, sometimes if finds you.

Chatham, more than any piece of geography, is synonymous with Paradise Valley. In log mansions up and down the Rockies, inhabited by everyone from Hollywood celebrities to dot-com billionaires and global power brokers, owning a Chatham, commissioned for a particular place on the wall, is as essential in some art collections as showcasing a Bierstadt, Moran or Catlin.

Collectors of his work include David Halbertstam, Tom Robbins, Carl Hiaasen, Will Hearst, Fay Vincent, Robert Hughes, Tom Brokaw, Ed Bradley, Yvon Chouinard, Tom Siebel, Paul Allen, Mario Batali, Sydney Pollack, Sam Shepard, Robert Wagner, Jill St. John, Ali MacGraw, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and Harrison Ford.

His style and approach to design have influenced a generation of younger disciples, and his legitimacy is further confirmed with his work serving as a reference in art school classrooms and textbooks. Moreover, Chatham’s limited edition lithography (initially launched to satiate the avalanche of demand for oil paintings) has allowed those of ordinary means to own his work.

Still, even as Chatham’s command and confidence of his brushstrokes elevated his reputation as one of the seminal contemporary landscape painters in the U.S., he felt unworthy when set against the high standard of his grandfather, who he calls “a towering influence.” Few of his friends were aware of his psychological yoke. In fact, he had stopped, for a time, making regular painting trips back to California as a result of it.

Chatham can tick off individual paintings by other artists that have left impressions on him. “The most powerful and haunting painting I’ve ever seen is Paolo Veronese’s The Conversion of Saul which is in the Hermitage,” he told writer Allen M. Jones in an interview with NewWest.net last year. “Not a day goes by that I do not recall how I felt in front of that stunning, nearly incomprehensible masterpiece, so enormous in its physical size, and so sweeping in emotional and formal content, that it seemed to embody everything truly great in the art of all the world.” Chatham also told Jones: “I have lifelong attention deficit disorder and this prevents me from doing anything which does not excite me emotionally.”

Still, in his Montana studio today, tucked into a non-descript downtown Livingston alley that could just as well be mistaken for a warehouse in Soho or San Francisco’s Mission District, Chatham, from memory, sketches and blocks in a large painting portraying the convergence of high rolling prairie and mountain. Behind him are works in progress, some that have flowed forth easily, others he has battled for years, still tenaciously attacking the compositional problems he is trying to overcome. In one scene, oriental and minimal in its motif, he has been moving a lone Ponderosa pine across the canvass to achieve balance with negative space. He’s applied layers of paint, studied it, walked away dissatisfied and returned to scrape it off and start anew.

He leads our discussion to Albert Pinkam Ryder, the ingenious, tortured and depressed landscape painter whose moody scenes are emotional tour de forces. Chatham relates to Ryder’s isolation and intensity, and uses him as a yardstick to put his own life in perspective, to avoid the impulse of social withdrawal that eventually left Ryder bordering on madness. Ryder, as he got older, would begin paintings and then start over, the same ones, again and again, unable to either abandon them or temporarily banish them from his mind to gain perspective.

“He got to a point in his life where, emotionally, he was wound tight as a spring and finally said ‘I can’t strike the image in anymore’” Chatham offers. Unlike Ryder, Chatham’s has not gone out; currently it burns so hot that on many days he awakes and can’t wait to reach the studio and launch into a new work. But getting there required he pass through the eye of a needle.

Disappearing into a back room, Chatham emerges carrying a small painting, Thicket, made by Piazzoni in 1913. His grandfather’s spontaneous response to ambient surroundings a century ago is stunning and joyous. “This little study is a pure response to nature and it came from a tremendously sophisticated education, a way of seeing and responding to the world around us – that has been largely forgotten,” Chatham says. “You look at this and you see that he didn’t care about anything that didn’t matter.”

Chatham chokes up sensing the passion that streamed out of his grandfather. The nostalgia he feels for his family is raw. He still has brushes, a palette knife, sketch boxes, and an easel, all of which belonged either to his grandfather, or his great uncle, Maurice Del Mue who died when Chatham was fifteen. Del Mue was the illustrator who created brand icons for the Arm and Hammer Baking Soda box, the yellow-robed figure on Hills Bros. Coffee cans and the eagle for the Ghiradelli Chocolate Company in San Francisco. Del Mue too had mystique and presence, though it was the sudden passing of Piazzoni that haunted Chatham most of his life. When he was five years old, he watched his grandfather become suddenly stricken at the breakfast table. The old man lurched forward, and died on the spot in front of him, but not before he uttered, matter-of-factly, the words “Good bye.” In the decades that followed, he says he carried on a one-sided dialogue with his grandfather through the work Piazzoni had left behind.

When the Bloomsbury Review interviewed Chatham in 2003 about his inner motivation for painting, he answered “All genuine art grows outward from the heart, and is a matter of sensations. Art inspired primarily by the intellect may induce awe, excitement, or even laughter, but never tears, and there is no great art without tears.” Even tough guys, even brilliant thinkers no matter what they do, have to learn to cry, he says, if they are willing – and courageous enough – to confront their own failings and reconcile the need to love and be loved by people important in their lives.

As Chatham neared the age of sixty, he, for the first time, stepped back and had a conversation with himself. Consumed by overwhelming anxiety in his personal life, he felt exhausted, swallowed up, he says, in “an emotional shitstorm.” He was at the end of his third marriage and a nasty divorce settlement left him scrambling to hold on to his gallery, studio, print shop, restaurant, even his very modest home. Clark City Press, deeply in debt, went into dormancy. (Today Clark City Press is a national imprint committed to universal literature.) In complete retreat, Chatham withdrew into reclusive self examination. On the wall in his bedroom was a particularly formidable painting of Piazzoni’s, a beacon to be confronted every day. Not realizing it at the time, Chatham was about to experience a cathartic purge that would change his life. The road which had steered him clear of Ryder’s fate would also lead him back home to California.

It was the late 1990’s, and the Italian American Museum in San Francisco was about to host a Piazzoni retrospective. Central to it were pieces Chatham had grown up with and other works he had never seen. Late one afternoon before the exhibition opened, he went to the museum alone and quietly strolled by the body of his grandfather’s work as if he was attending a wake.

All his life, Chatham believed he had fully understood his grandfather’s impulses, his rationale for approaching subject matter and his method with color. Now, as a mature painter, he was humbled because he realized there was so much he didn’t know about the man. In fact, it was if he knew nothing at all. Like any brilliant artist, he noticed with unvarnished clarity that Piazzoni’s work had its human inconsistencies. In Papa’s brushstrokes he recognized unexplainable decisions his grandfather had made in his problem solving. And suddenly, in place of the familiar sense of understanding, there was complete mystery. “All my life, I had believed that I had a complete and absolute grasp of what my grandfather did, more so than anyone else in my family, let alone those outside of it,” he says. “Then, in the silence of those rooms as I studied what was around me, the familiar and the thrillingly unfamiliar alike, I thought not only can I never even understand him, let alone be him, but I cannot even be his shadow. I can only be me, whatever that may be worth, and that’s it, that’s all I can ever be.”

Despite his rock star persona, Chatham is not one to reveal the private parts of himself, that basement where his most profound insecurities lie. But on that afternoon in San Francisco, he finally gave himself up to that peerless myth, resigning himself to foregoing the burden he had carried forth for most of his life. Relieved, he went back to his hotel room, sank onto the bed where he had a long, hard, uncontrollable sob. It proved to be a transcendental experience.

Returning to Montana, the weight seemed to have lifted away and with a different attitude, not only does Chatham carry an even greater reverence for Piazzoni, but a new freedom from that homage which allows him to expand into a realm where his ancestor could never go. The result is larger, bolder statements which push the limits of pathos into an unexplored emotional terrain. Festive color, abundantly present in Chatham’s early California and Montana years, is surfacing again. Compositionally, he’s exploring a wider array of visual entry points to a concept, toying with points of view his grandfather would have never dreamed of.

Chatham admits he’s somewhat driven to marshal a hopeful visual reply to dissonance and destruction in the world, the exploitation of wild places, and the seemingly implacable politics of empire. “The artist does not simply hold a mirror to society,” he wrote presciently in 1994. “If the world now 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.”

In Boulder Valley Ranch, the muted fog of previous works has been burned off by the sun. The yin and yang of abstraction and realistic vision elevate a pastoral foothill, painted at midday, into heroic proportions. With another work Moonrise Over Sweetgrass Creek, painted for his friend the chef Mario Batali, Chatham delivers a breathtaking nocturne in softened grays rivaling those of Corot or Whistler.

Animated now in his studio, he explains what he once described as the core tenets in Piazzoni’s work. “The first was an obvious feeling that every piece was almost tragically beautiful, filled with longing, hope, and the presence of divinity. Next, and this is almost shockingly important, I realized that even the most seemingly simple painting was always utterly unconventional.” Chatham made this observation years ago, he says, completely unaware this epiphany about the art of his grandfather pertained equally to himself, and that it would apply just as fittingly to him, in the autumn of his own life as a painter. He realizes now, he came to the wilderness of Montana seeking a place entirely different and separate from anything he’d known, when in fact it was a journey in search of himself.

Over the years, Chatham has evolved as a cartographer specializing in mapping out moods without words, and he continually stalks a vision which remains elusive. Self-deprecatingly, he claims he has never produced a work which has left him completely satisfied, although he admits to always being after a masterpiece. Some collectors believe otherwise. Will Hearst, for instance, points to a physically small painting completed some months after the two spent several days together camping and walking the vast unspoiled acreage which lies behind the castle on the central California coast. This is but one of a number of Chatham paintings in the Hearst collection which includes many historically significant works by 19th and 20th century European and American artists. “This work has an Olympian feeling which defies its size,” Hearst says. “I consider it one of Russell’s masterworks.” In it, Chatham’s traditional conveyance of the mystery of landform collides with an ethereal seaside skyscape. There is an epic quality to its spatial dimensions, a complicated compositional asymmetry between tonal layers and detailed brushstrokes, all blending together in a horizontal eruption of billowing light.

Chatham believes that as soulful creatures, people cannot fundamentally change what is inside them, from the time they are children until reaching the ends of their lives. Rather, the struggle of honest introspection, learning more about our strengths and frailties, allows us to expand and flourish in ways we never see as young people when ego wears the illusionary mask of immortality. “I have come to believe that all great art no matter which of the forms it takes is fundamentally spiritual. Not biblically or scripturally so, but in ephemeral ways impossible to explain. Much of this has to do with the belief 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.”

Not long ago, a Livingston friend spotted Chatham standing in the Yellowstone River not far away from a beater car he owns and in attire, including a floppy hat that looks like it was purchased at the Salvation Army. “At first I thought it was the best fly fishing homeless man I had ever seen,” he explained. “Then I realized it was Russ going incognito not wanting to be hassled by groupies."

While Chatham has no regrets about the often wild indoor and outdoor lives he’s led, he admits he sometimes anguishes over not having spent more time painting. “Early on, I was never concerned about having a career, so I didn’t have one. And now nothing could interest me less. But I think we all have a programmed tape running inside us, and most of mine is now stored on the right hand side of the cassette. I finally feel I know enough to paint what I could only dream about in my twenties. People say it’s time to slow down, relax, go fishing. Well, I took the first forty years of my life off and went fishing, and now my tape is telling me to finish what I was put on earth to do. Before, time didn’t matter. Now it does.”

When he was a young man in California, Chatham recalls, “I had a tremendous sense of space growing up, not the actual ownership of it, but the feeling of ownership.” That sentient optimism, he says, has returned. For most of his life as a painter, Chatham never allowed himself to consider the possibility of setting foot upon the terra incognita beyond Piazzoni. He would not contemplate the possibility that in his own time, he could ever break fresh ground.

Today, anyone who cares to, may see in what direction Chatham is running. It’s toward a wood in the middle of one of his paintings, through mist, over a ridge top and into a dream. It’s true people become lost in such places, carrying the hope of never being found. On the outskirts of Paradise Valley, he finally knows he’s entered a clearing where, “I feel like I’m down on one knee tying my shoe, looking up at the track of life, ready to begin another race.”

For the legendary Russell Chatham, now in the sixth iteration of living large, he is escaping into an abiding understory. No longer is the shadowland a waking dream empty with the haunt of a final salutation from Piazzoni. This place, warmer, welcoming, and a haven which lets the bright light in, belongs to him.

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