Painting, Writing, Cooking...

An Interview with Russell Chatham

By Allen M. Jones, 7-20-05

	Mike Gurnett, Photo

Montana artist and publisher, Russell Chatham, upon the occasion of two new releases from his book house, Clark City Press (For All Time by Helen Claypool, and Mile High Mile Deep by Richard K. O'Malley), recently took the time to answer some questions from New West.

New West: You're reviving your book house, Clark City Press, after shutting its doors in the early nineties. For a small press, your list of titles was extraordinary. What happened during the first go around, despite the quality of material, to push you away from publishing? What are you trying to do differently with this newest incarnation?

Russell Chatham: The old Clark City Press operated entirely within the system, and the system is designed only to feed itself using those who buy into it. I put about a million and a half dollars, and another friend of the Press kicked four hundred thousand into the old company, and this is what it cost to do what it did. However, even if it had had access to another two million, which it didn’t, it would never even come close to breaking even, let alone generating any profit. It was an open and shut case of knowing when to fold ‘em.

The new version is completely divorced from the system in every way. I have spent my whole life turning my back to the establishment. How and why I was sucked into it, even briefly, rather mystifies me even now. We have no staff in the ordinary sense, no board of directors, no investors, no marketing department, no wholesalers or distributors, no nothing really, other than a commitment to producing the highest quality trade books ever made in America. And we do not sell them to entities with corporate orientation such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Borders, or Hastings, but rather only to independent bookstores, libraries, schools and individuals.

The financial goal is to hopefully break even in the next several years, and if that should happen, I will consider that a resounding success. When you demand extremely high quality not just in books, but in anything, you will find yourself among a very tiny minority. Therefore, to remain true, you have to be satisfied with rewards commensurate with your ideals.

NW: In addition to your paintings and lithographs, your interests have bounced all over the map. You've written a number of personal essays, particularly about hunting and fishing. Your restaurant, the Livingston Bar & Grille, has collected a reputation all out of proportion to its size and location. What commonalities do you find across these pursuits? What strengths do you bring to your art that help you in your other areas of interest?

RC: It’s both an honor and a curse to be good at so many things. It’s probably why I’m not a great painter, but rather just a very good one. There is commonality however, and here’s what it is. I became interested in fishing and hunting at an early age, and I read everything I could get my hands on about the subjects. At first it was magazines, but the books soon followed, and by the time I was twenty-five, I’d read everything there was, which is to say, everything I could find. That’s when I decided to try to learn to write, based on fifteen years of avid reading. By the time I was thirty, I was earning my living by writing, and continued to do so until I was forty.

At forty, I had been painting steadily for thirty years, but still had not developed my own voice to the degree I hoped was possible, so I let up on writing, and put my shoulder to painting. At the same time, I decided to learn lithography. At this point, I made my first trip to Europe which was key to understanding painting. And for the next ten years I painted nearly every day, and made ten more trips to Europe, so that by the time I was fifty I was well educated enough to start making progress. This did happen, and there are a number of pretty good works during the decade from fifty to sixty. However, during the latter half of those years, there was an emotional shitstorm which nearly sunk the ship. It’s too long and convoluted a story to get into here. It’s enough to know that the sun finally came out, and there I was, tested, and at last developed and ready to roll.

The act of cooking was interesting to me as a teenager, and that has only increased over the years. I started reading cookbooks at the age of twenty-one, concentrating first on Europe, and later on the Orient. Having traveled around the world at least twenty times, I’ve eaten in thousands of restaurants, and have studied the cuisine of every country. I studied the operation of dozens of high quality restaurants in America, going from the chic of Lutece, to the simplest Mexican and Chinese cafes. When I opened the Bar & Grille in 1996, I had structured a plan to make it capable of standing with the best, even though its venue was a small, largely poor western town rather than a real city.

Where was I? Oh, back to commonality. My greatest strengths I think are, first of all understanding that in any endeavor, historical knowledge and perspective are essential. And second, I seem to intuitively be able to sort the wheat from the chaff, in that I know why Mozart is greater than Paganini. And finally, I have tenacity and endurance, and will not ever compromise, no matter what.

NW: Your two newest books, memoirs by Helen Claypool and Richard K. O'Malley, despite widely divergent subject matters, have in common a certain sentimentality. They're both elegies of a sort. Was this intentional on your part? In building the list for Clark City Press, are you looking for certain themes? What other books do you have on tap?

RC: With respect to For All Time and Mile High Mile Deep, I don’t think either are sentimental in the least, but rather are books infused with meaningful sentiment, which is very different. It’s this quality which elicits the appropriate teary responses.

In building Clark City’s list, there is no theme whatsoever. However, there is an agenda, and that is for every project to have intrinsic value, seriousness of intent, and emotional, intellectual, and artistic integrity.

The choice of these two titles was entirely serendipitous. They came to me from out of nowhere, I recognized their value, realized no one else would publish them because there was not enough money to be made, and acted upon my conviction.

The same could be said of our next three books: Birds of a Feather, the complete poems of Ed Lahey; Motherlode: A Women’s History of Butte; and The Berkeley Pit by Dorothy Bryant who I have come to believe is one of our finest living authors. All of these materialized out of thin air, and it’s entirely accidental that they all involve Butte, America.

Other books to come in the future include The Complete Poems of Keith Wilson, which is an enormous volume we’ve been working on for years; Victoria by Knut Hamsun; the essays of A.B. Guthrie, Jr.; Catskill Innkeeper, a biography of Art Flick; and then there are a half dozen of my own, both painting and fishing oriented.

NW: As a painter, your grandfather, Gottardo Piazonni, has been an obvious influence on your work. What other influences do you see in your painting? Whom do you admire as a writer? As a chef?

RC: If you have drive and energy, it’s natural to question what you were born with and grew up with, and restlessness only fuels that fire. And so, I spent most of the considerable money I made traveling, looking for new cultural experiences, better food, better art, lovelier women, more interesting fishing and hunting. Now, at sixty-five, with forty years of relentless searching behind me, I have found no locale more perfect than the California I grew up in, the terrible rub being that it has been almost completely destroyed by the cancer that is us.

I also discovered that my grandfather is as fine an artist as I always thought. And this is after decades of studying and evaluating everything I could find on the planet. He remains a towering and inspiring influence.

As the years have passed, there have come to be others whose influence has perhaps been less emotional, but valuable nevertheless, Millet for example whose commitment to theme, and mother of pearl surfaces are utterly angelic. Early on, I was drawn to Albert Ryder, and part of me still is, but when I discovered Thomas Moran, I found far greater technical skin, emotional depth, and tremendous staying power. Moreover, I have tried to absorb essences from great masters such as Goya and Rembrandt, even though our motifs are very different. The most powerful and haunting painting I’ve ever seen, is Paolo Veronese’s The Conversion of Saul which is in The Hermitage. 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.

The question as to who I admire as writers, is too big to begin to answer here. In my immediate world, they are Richard S. Wheeler and Dorothy Bryant. Historically, it would take forever to comment as you like so many different authors at different times for different reasons. For instance, I read some Hemingway forty years ago, but he was out of favor to some extent, especially with younger people, and I didn’t quite get it. In recent years, I re-visited him, and now feel he was one of the best American authors ever. I’ve been especially moved by Melville, Cather, and Steinbeck, among others. And then there’s Europe, the British Isles, Scandinavia, Russia, South America, the Mid and Far East, and that’s what we don’t have time for now. For the last five years I’ve been reading mostly poetry, Hayden Carruth, Wendell Berry, Ray Carver, Robert Creeley, Keith Wilson, Ed Dorn, Jim Harrison, Charles Olson, W.S. Merwin, Carolyn Kizer, and so on. I have also made a run at Shakespeare’s sonnets, Yeats, Byron, Rilke, Rimbaud, and Rumi, among others. For a person like myself who has had no formal education, this is like a safari into deepest Africa, or the Orient, as it was a century ago, all about finding a way to comprehend the unfamiliar, exotic, and obscure.

I think the word chef has been used far too loosely in America, just as has the word artist. Auguste Escoffier was a chef, Paul Bocuse was a chef, Andre Soltner was a chef, and there have been and are many true, excellent cooks, cum chefs, whose names have not been recorded in history, past or present. Good cooking is a matter of taste, understanding of traditions, much practice, humility, and sensitivity. Where you are least likely to find a quality chef is in a modern, trendy American restaurant.

NW: Fly-fishing and bird hunting, painting and writing, publishing and restaurants, seems like you've seized the day and then some. Are there any interests that you haven't explored? Any new pursuits waiting in the wings?

RC: No. I have lifelong attention deficit disorder, and this prevents me from doing anything which does not excite me emotionally. For instance, I’ve been to Mexico about thirty times, and while I can pick out the moron words and phrases, there is absolutely no way I could learn the language. It’s just a big, gray, fuzzy area in my brain that just doesn’t compute. I’ve never touched a golf club and never will. Nor will I ever run for office, or put on a suit and tie. I also can’t seem to learn to even turn on, much less operate a computer. What I will do, is to continue to paint for the duration, try to make the restaurant better and better, design and publish books, which I’m pretty passionate about, and the thing which stalled out while I was learning to paint – writing. I eagerly look forward to putting it back at the head of the list. I have a number of books in my head, and they’re rather large ones at that.

Like this story? Get more! Sign up for our free newsletters.