The opening chapter of my book

Home Waters

On a fine Saturday afternoon in late April the year of my tenth birthday, I left my house with fishing rod and small tackle box strapped to my bicycle.  Pedaling north one block and east four blocks on the small-town back streets, I turned left onto the shoulder of the highway and coasted downhill for a half mile to the high iron bridge.  There I dismounted from the bike, pushed it around the guard rail and under the span, and clambered down the steep bank to the water.  Big River was flowing strongly, green and clear in the sun, and the water was cold against the pair of cheap plastic hip waders I'd recently purchased with money from mowing lawns.  I selected a new lure from my meager supply of tackle, a Rapala floating minnow imitation, and tied it onto my line with a loop knot that I'd learned about by reading my grandpa’s outdoor magazines. I waded along the bank downstream to the riffle, where I knew I could get across the river without going in over my waders.  Safely reaching the gravel bar on the other side, I walked up along the edge of the gravel to where I could move out into the river and cast toward the other side. 

I slowly made my way up the shallow stream as the afternoon passed, catching mostly longear sunfish and green sunfish, or “sun perch” and “black perch” as I knew them back then.  I can still remember the deep pocket in the little indentation along that clay bank; I could point out exactly where it was as I write this, well over a half century later.  I can remember the little lure splashing the surface and diving in a seductive wiggle as I started the retrieve, and I definitely remember the smallmouth bass that slammed into the lure. 

I hope that by this time the statute of limitations has run out, because bass season was closed, but when I finally grasped the lower jaw of that glistening, bronze-backed bass, I couldn't bear to release it.  It was about 16 inches long, the biggest smallmouth I'd ever caught.  I slipped that poor fish down the left leg of my waders and immediately started downriver to my bike.  Pedaling up the long hill on the highway shoulder was a lot more difficult than coasting down it had been, and I was fearful that somebody would stop me and see the illicit fish.  But I reached home safely and ran into the house to show my parents my trophy. 

Dad admired the fish for a bit, saying that it sure was a nice smallmouth.  And then he took me by the shoulders, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Son, let that be the last bass you keep out of season.”

It was.

Big River, just downstream from where I caught that first smallmouth, from an old photo.

In the next few years I spent a great deal of my free time on the river.  My dad and grandfather were both avid anglers, but Grandpa was mostly interested in catching crappie in the local lakes, and my dad was a reservoir bass fisherman.  I loved fishing with Dad in his big aluminum johnboat on the larger Ozark lakes, but there was something about the river and those powerful little smallmouth bass that the fat largemouth in the big waters just seemed to lack.  Dad, who had fished the river in his younger days, understood my attraction to it, and when I was 13 years old, he surprised me one day with a cheap 12-foot aluminum johnboat that I could use to float Big River.  For two years, my friends and I cajoled our parents incessantly to drive us and that boat to the river and pick us up at the end of the day, and when we got our driver's licenses, they must have breathed sighs of relief.  The little boat left aluminum scrapes on the rocks of Big River for many miles.

I replaced the boat with my first canoe in 1970, the year I graduated from high school.  By the early 1970s, the biggest thing in angling was the explosion in popularity of tournament bass fishing.  I was attending the local junior college, working in a supermarket in the summer, and fishing in the local bass club tournaments nearly every weekend.  I still floated and fished the rivers, but I had dreams of becoming a professional bass fisherman.  The river was a different place to fish and those smallmouth were special, but tournaments were held on the big lakes.  At the time, plans for a high dam on the Meramec River, little more than an hour away, were in the news, and we bass club members spent many hours poring over topographic maps of the area of the river to be inundated by the new lake, enthused by the idea of a big reservoir so close to home.  We gave little thought to the fact that a river would be lost to the lake.

 However, I was reading about the Corps of Engineers project from the perspective of the people who opposed it and wanted the river to remain as it was, and I began to harbor vague feelings that something important would be lost if the Meramec was flooded. I wondered how I would feel if my favorite stretches of my “home river”, Big River, disappeared.  Yet the lure of a great new fishing lake remained strong.

My change of heart came about in an odd way.  I'd developed interests in geology and archeology, and one day I saw an advertisement for a book called “The Buffalo River Country”, by Ken Smith.  The Buffalo, the most spectacularly scenic of all Ozark rivers, had been designated the nation's first “National River” a couple of years before, and the book had been instrumental in recruiting advocates for the National River idea as opposed to the dams that had been planned for the river.  But it was mainly the advertising copy, which noted that the book covered the river's geology and archeology, that intrigued me enough to order it.

When the book came in the mail, I immediately opened the package and started paging through it.  In the vernacular of the times, I was “blown away”.  The photos in that book were amazing, not so much because of their exceptional quality, but simply because of what they depicted.  I had never known that an Ozark stream could be so beautiful.  Somehow it made me realize for the first time the treasure that all these little rivers of the Ozark region represented.  I suddenly understood that even Big River had intrinsic value, as ordinary as I'd always considered it to be and as abused as it was in the old lead mining area where I had grown up.  And it made me rethink the Meramec Dam issue.

By 1977 I had graduated from college and was married and teaching art in Advance, Missouri, and the Meramec Dam controversy was at its height.  I had become firmly against the dam, but though I'd floated several of the most well-known Ozark rivers, I'd yet to float the section of the Meramec that was slated for destruction.  My wife and I decided it was time to finally visit the endangered section and see for ourselves what we stood to lose.  We had become active in environmental organizations, including the Ozark Society, the group that had been among the staunchest defenders of the Buffalo, and we had written a few letters against the Meramec Dam, but we wanted to be able to talk about it from firsthand experience.  So, in the summer of 1977 we set out on a two-day trip from Onondaga Cave to Meramec State Park.

The put-in at Onondaga back then was at an old "hog trough" low water bridge, so named because the parallel tracks of lengthwise planks upon which a vehicle’s tires were supposed to run, laid atop a layer of narrower planks crossways to the span, must have resembled a wooden hog trough to the old timers.  These bridges were made entirely of timber, down to the thick pilings buried in the gravel bottom which supported the span, and to anyone knowing the power of floods on streams such as the Meramec, the fact that they survived as long as they had was surprising.  We clattered across the bridge and parked on the north bank just downstream, where we launched the canoe and left our vehicle for a canoe livery to pick up and move to our take-out the next day.

We shoved off, with my wife holding down the stern and paddling while I fished.  As soon as we left the campground area I picked up a rod, and on the second cast I caught a nice 16 inch largemouth bass.  It was followed soon afterwards by a 13 inch smallmouth.

We soon came to the first bluff, high on river left and mostly obscured by trees.  Then as the river swung across its valley, a beautiful 80 foot wall of limestone came into view, fronted by a narrow ledge of alluvial soil lined with a single row of big sycamore trees, the layered rock strata oddly bowed upward in the center of the cliff.  The river was narrow and intimate there, trees arching overhead and shutting out the weak sun of a slightly overcast day.  Then the river split, with most of the water plunging through a narrow chute to the right and past a cave with a ten-foot-high opening in the cliff before sliding beneath an overhanging bluff rising nearly a hundred feet out of the river.  Water dripped off the rock, dotting the quietly swirling river surface.

Emerging from that narrow channel, we came to a wide stretch of river with a hundred-foot bluff set back from a narrow strip of bottom field cleared to water's edge.  At the margin of a water willow bed in a shallow pool, a large bass ripped into my spinnerbait, and I had visions of a trophy smallmouth, but when it turned broadside at the surface near the canoe I could see the black band down its side and knew it was a largemouth.  Nevertheless, a 19-inch river largemouth bass was a fine catch and merited some photos before releasing it.

We reached Campbell Bridge, five miles below Onondaga, after passing four more bluffs from 80 to 160 feet high.  Each one was different, but they were equally gorgeous, framed in bankside trees and clearing blue skies.  I switched lures, and immediately had a huge smallmouth, well over 20 inches, follow the white wobbling bait to the canoe before slashing at it as I lifted it from the water.  Before the day was over I'd catch nine bass from 13 to 17 inches on the white lure, but none like that one. 

The largest fish of the first day, a 17-inch smallmouth.

We passed beneath what I would later learn was Vilander Bluff, one of the highest and most scenic cliffs on the entire river, a buff and blue-gray streaked rock face rising over 200 feet.  I knew from my topographic map that two caves, Dry Cave and Little Onyx Cave, emerge from the bluff, and we stopped to climb up the steep talus slope to Little Onyx, hearing the eerie moaning sound of pigeons.  The birds clattered out of the cave as we reached it.  We didn't venture far into the gloom and were soon back on the river.

More bluffs, more interesting riffles, and wildlife including three mink and three species of herons, combined with the good fishing to keep us entertained in the three more miles down to Blue Springs Creek.  By the time we reached the low water bridge at the mouth of the creek, the afternoon was waning.  We slipped through a breach torn in the bridge, which was another wooden hog trough affair with planks missing or tilting crazily. We supposed there was little reason to repair these bridges when they might soon be buried under the lake.  Searching for a campsite, we passed up several good bars because there were other people around the summer cabins that lined the river near the bridge, and finally picked an intimate spot on a rather brushy bar a mile downstream.  Setting up camp, we heated some canned beef stew and enjoyed a hot meal in the orange light of the setting sun.  A nearly full moon gradually replaced the dying glow to the west, and we retreated to the tent and listened to the babble of the nearby riffle and a serenade of screech owls before dropping off to sleep.

We awoke in the cool, gray dawn, the river shrouded in mist, and ate a leisurely breakfast of hot oatmeal and tea, waiting for the promised sun to burn off the dew before folding the tent and loading the canoe.  In the eight miles to our take-out that second day, there would be fewer bluffs, but the river remained very attractive, with its mixture of riffles, fast runs, and long pools.  Banks lined with rocks and old, slick, submerged sycamore logs appealed to my fishing instincts, and I experimented with different colors of the wobbling lure that had produced the day before, finally settling on a green and black combination.  By the time we stopped for lunch just below Sappington Bridge, I'd released 10 bass from 12 to 17 inches.  But the river was saving its best for near the end.

The warm sun and the quiet buzz of summer insects in the riverside trees invited drowsiness, and soon my wife was dozing in the back of the canoe, the stern end cap and her paddle supporting her head and shoulders.  With 14 nice bass released by that time, I probably wasn't fishing as alertly as before, but in the back of my mind was the thought of that big smallmouth I'd seen the previous day at Campbell Bridge, and the hope for another one that size.

It was a swirling run, the river curving against a high clay bank, just a couple of miles above the park.  The canoe was tight against the vertical alluvium as I used the narrow zone of water slowed by friction against the bank to control the craft while I fished, since my wife and paddler was still dozing instead of handling the boat.  I was casting ahead of the canoe, parallel to the bank.  Cast and retrieve, cast and retrieve; halfway down the run, a paddle stroke to keep the canoe in position; cast and retrieve, cast and—there was a great swirl just as the lure dipped beneath the surface and I set the hooks against solid resistance.  My shout roused my wife, and she gasped as the big smallmouth cleared the water by two feet in its only real leap.  The big ones seldom waste much energy in jumping, and after that memorable sight, this one bored for the bottom, pumping a third of my rod down into the water, and then surged into a powerful run toward the middle of the river that swung the front end of the canoe around and stripped yards of line off my reel.  It surfaced as I dipped the rod tip and applied pressure to the side to discourage any more dangerous leaps.  Then the bass shot across the bow of the canoe in another powerful run toward the bank, towing the canoe back the other way.  Wife backpaddled away from the bank and a tangle of logs that would have given the bass refuge and a chance at fouling the line, and the battle settled into a series of surges and rolls and dives that ended when I forced the fish's head up and grasped its lower jaw, lifting 22 inches and five pounds of bronzeback, still one of the biggest Ozark river smallmouth I've ever caught.

The 22-inch smallmouth from that first trip.  I carried this little photo around in my wallet for several years.  I was much younger then!

After that trip, I wrote articles in a regional periodical, letters to politicians, and missives to newspapers, all extolling the virtues of the undammed Meramec, and I'd like to think I played a small role in the final fate of the Meramec Dam, voted down by regional referendum and eventually de-authorized.  I'd fallen in love with this beautiful river, and in the following years I got to know the whole Meramec, even floating it from its highest normal put-in, Short Bend near Highway 19, to Times Beach, a total of more than 160 miles, in one epic 12-day trip.  I also learned the Bourbeuse, Huzzah, Courtois, a couple of smaller tributary streams that are little known and seldom floated, and even several little tributary creeks which I explored by wading.  The streams of the Meramec Basin are still some of my favorite float destinations, and I've seen the changes, both good and bad, that have overtaken the rivers and the watershed.

The Meramec and its tributaries drain around 2,149 square miles of eastern Missouri, just southwest of St. Louis.  The system contains three major Ozark streams, the Meramec, Bourbeuse, and Big River, along with two smaller but canoe-navigable feeder streams, Huzzah and Courtois creeks, two marginally floatable streams, the Mineral Fork, tributary to Big River, and Indian Creek, tributary to the Meramec, and a long stream with little water, Dry Fork.  The Meramec itself is nearly 220 miles from its source to where it empties into the Mississippi River just south of St. Louis.  Big River, the largest tributary, is 138 miles long, and the Bourbeuse flows for 147 miles.  In total there are well over 500 miles of permanently flowing streams within the basin that are large enough to furnish typical recreation such as fishing and swimming.  And none of this water is much more than two hours’ driving time from the largest metropolitan area in the state of Missouri; a good portion of it lies less than an hour from the city of St. Louis.

Moreover, there is a remarkable diversity to the waters and land within this watershed.  The Meramec itself begins as a usually dry stream flowing northward from the vicinity of Salem in a typical Ozark Plateau landscape that is a mix of rough, steep hollows and ridges and more gently rolling pasturelands.  It picks up water from small seeps and springs and becomes a perennially flowing stream about 15 miles from its highest source.  It has been floated in good water from that point but does not really become big enough to float a loaded canoe, even in the higher water levels of spring, for a dozen more miles.  From there, the upper river runs for nearly 30 miles, a typical small, gravel bottomed Ozark stream, surrounded by hills and cleared bottom fields with frequent low cliffs of the dolomitic limestone so characteristic of much of the Ozarks, before receiving a major inflow from Maramec Spring.

Upper reach of the Meramec

(Note the different spelling of Maramec Spring.  Old published reports spelled it that way, though it was probably a mistake that it was not spelled the same as the river.  The James Foundation, which has owned the spring since the 1800s, has kept this traditional spelling.  In fact, “Meramec” is itself a corruption of the supposed Native American pronunciation of the river.  Legend has it that the Native American word signified “waters of ugly fish”, or catfish.  The French spelled the Indian word “Miaramiguoua”, and the river’s name has gone through a number of different historic spellings before the present version.)

The spring, which emerges from the ground in a beautiful park, is the fifth largest spring in Missouri, a state known for huge springs.  Under its influence, the Meramec for the next 8 miles or so becomes a trout stream, with water temperatures more hospitable to cold water fish and other creatures than the cool water species usually found in the Ozarks.  From that point the river is big enough to furnish year-round canoe floating and some use by jet outboard powered watercraft.  In the next 37 miles, fed by other springs and small creeks, the Meramec grows slowly larger, and as the spring influence wanes, it reverts into the kind of cool water habitat so typical of the larger Ozark streams.  Receiving the waters of Huzzah Creek, itself doubled by the merging with its sister stream Courtois Creek just a mile above the Meramec, the river becomes noticeably wider.  Huzzah and Courtois are twin gems; fast, exceptionally clear, and flowing through quietly scenic Ozark valleys. 

Huzzah Creek

                                                                 

Downstream from the Huzzah is the Meramec's most spectacular section, the part of the river once endangered by the Meramec Dam, with high, rugged bluffs at every bend, clear green water, and clean gravel bars.  At the end of that section, in the vicinity of where the dam would have been, the river winds by Meramec State Park, one of Missouri's finest parks.  Below the park, the river begins to slow a bit, and more of the ills of civilization become apparent, notably in the form of cabins and clubhouses along the banks.  But the Meramec remains classically Ozarkian in character until it reaches the mouth of its second largest tributary, the Bourbeuse River.

Meramec in the stretch that would have been dammed.

The Bourbeuse is far from a typical Ozark stream.  A good portion of the land it drains is underlain by sandstone, rather than the dolomite and limestone that covers most of the Ozarks.  Its valley is wider and shallower than that of the Meramec, a mosaic of small farms, woodlots, and pastureland, and the river flows more slowly than a typical Ozark stream.  With the abundance of cleared agricultural land, the Bourbeuse is usually murky, both from erosion from cleared bottom fields and from algal growth due to fertilizer and livestock waste runoff.  Yet its water quality is reasonably good, and inhabitants include not only the usual Ozark species, but some that are more typical of the flatter lands of northern Missouri.

Bourbeuse River

                                                           

Below the Bourbeuse, the Meramec flows for 25 miles before reaching its biggest tributary by average volume, Big River.  While the Bourbeuse flows through younger geologic formations along the flank of the Ozark uplift, the headwaters of Big River are in the Precambrian hills of the St. Francois Mountains, the geologic center of the Ozarks and the oldest exposed rock in the region.  When the river emerges from the St. Francois Mountains, it runs through the former lead mining area known as the Old Lead Belt, where it is badly damaged by the effects of previous mining activity, and from there it enters another mining area, this time barite mining, where it is further degraded.  Picking up the clear, clean waters of the Mineral Fork, the river continues into the continually expanding suburbs of the St. Louis area, and cabins and residences are very common along the banks.  Yet the river, for all the abuses it suffers, still retains a surprisingly healthy Ozarkian ecology.

Big River

                                                               

Downstream from Big River, the Meramec is a large, slow, and murky urban stream, a far cry from the sparkling clear waters of the upper river.  It is surrounded by suburbs and industry, sectioned off by many bridges, its banks altered by gravel and sand dredging in numerous places.  But its water quality remains acceptable and it furnishes recreation for many of the citizens of the St. Louis area.  

Lower Meramec

With the variety of lands and rocks in the watershed, the range of different stream characteristics, and the overall quality of riverine habitat, the Meramec and its tributaries are home to the largest number of species of aquatic life of any Ozark river system.  With clear headwater creeks, clean, strongly flowing mid-size streams, the slower and more fertile farm country waters of the Bourbeuse, and finally the lower river with its connection to the Mississippi, the system boasts just about every type of riparian habitat to be found in the Midwest.  Along with the quality and diversity of the streams of the Meramec Basin, its proximity to St. Louis makes it perhaps the most important riverine recreational area in the region.  That proximity also puts the system in perpetual danger of suffering abuses from human activities.  The mining areas on Big River are the most obvious, but far from the only environmental problems within the watershed.  Unwise land clearing with subsequent erosion of sediments into the waters is a ubiquitous problem.  Clearing of riparian forest cover makes banks susceptible to damage.  Gravel dredging, both for commercial use and in misguided attempts to control flooding and bank erosion, adversely affects the hydrology and the stream habitat.  Suburban sprawl, with attendant septic tank problems and storm water run-off, degrades water quality along with the aesthetics of the landscape.  The large percentage of the watershed used for raising cattle presents its own problems with nutrient pollution and agricultural wastes.  Moreover, the portions of the rivers closest to St. Louis flow through industrial areas with their own sources of pollution, along with alterations to the channel and banks.

In some places the streams are simply in danger of being loved to death.  Numerous campgrounds and canoe liveries are found over much of the Meramec, along with the Huzzah and Courtois.  While most of the campground and livery owners try to be good stewards of the stream resource, the sheer volume of users can have severe effects on both water quality and the recreational experience.  Add to that the continually growing popularity of high-speed jet boat use, with its attendant wave wash attacking banks, and the mainstream Meramec often seems to be in danger of drowning under a sea of people.

Yet the river and its sister streams have so many places where one can find solitude and quiet beauty.   Drift down the middle Meramec on a winter day when the colors are all muted grays and browns beneath cloudy skies, and the quietly flowing water is dark and mysterious as it swirls beneath a towering bluff.  Ride Huzzah Creek in a kayak down a twisting, laughing riffle that opens out onto a smooth run beneath giant sycamore trees growing across from a gravel bar gleaming in the sun, where you can see every rock on the bottom in the six feet of amazingly clear water and watch the minnows and suckers fleeing from the shadow of your craft.  Paddle along a steep hillside on Big River on an April day, when the bluebells are blooming thickly in the narrow, wooded zone at the base of the hill and the redbuds with their showy bouquets punctuate the valley sides.  Lean back in your seat and soak in the understated beauty of a long, still Bourbeuse River pool, lined on one side with thick bankside forest and on the other by a low bluff that has shed great sandstone boulders into the river throughout the ages.  Then you'll see why I love these Ozark gems.

As we reach 2020, I realize that I've been a professional artist for over 36 years.  In my wildest dreams, I don't think I could have imagined this career going the way it has when I first started in the middle of 1983.  The beginning of my wildlife art career coincided with my marriage to Mary.  I had taught art from kindergarten through 12 grade in the small public school in Advance, MO for seven years, and though I enjoyed many aspects of teaching, the frustrations were mounting, and I was ready to do something else with my life. My art in those years was something I did as a hobby in the evenings, though I occasionally sold a painting.  I had shown at a couple of local art shows, and had gotten a few commissions to paint things like the childhood homes of a couple of people, a few pet portraits, and a series of wildlife paintings for a local bank.

I'd met Mary the year before on a canoe trip to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, and we'd hit it off quickly.  As we talked of getting married, we were also discussing my work.  Mary believed in me from the first, but I had the idea that I'd like to get an advanced degree and teach at the university level.  Mary had just graduated as a registered nurse, and nurses were in high demand so we knew we'd have at least one steady income...so what should I do?  Go back to school, or try to make it as an artist?

Two things happened in 1983 that pushed me into an art career.  The first was that in applying to the schools I was interested in attending, I was told that I'd need to take some of my basic art courses over again; apparently they didn't think much of Southeast Missouri State's art department at the time.  And I entered and won the 1984 Missouri Trout Stamp Contest.  Knowing very little about stamp contests but knowing that both the federal and many state duck stamp contest winners made a lot of money, I thought winning the trout stamp contest would bring in plenty of cash.  I was wrong, but at least it gave me the impetus to strike out on my own as an artist.

The trout stamp painting shown here was a transparent watercolor.  I had a great watercolor teacher at Southeast MO State, Jake Wells, and he'd gotten me dedicated to the medium.

At the time I was also producing pen and ink drawings of various Missouri animals and birds, and because of the Trout Stamp connection to the Missouri Department of Conservation, I began selling the drawings and small watercolors to Conservation Department employees.  I have few photos of these early works, but I remember doing foxes, coyotes, bobcats, and deer.  From this beginning, I really didn't have much trouble selling my art, and by the end of 1984 it was beginning to look like it might be possible to make a living, or at least supplement Mary's salary, with my art.

1985.  There were people who told me I should produce bigger paintings in oils or acrylics, so I took an early foray into acrylics, which is what these two paintings are. The wolf painting, "Midnight Run", was a 22 X 28 inch acrylic.  Wolves would become one of the subjects for which I became best known. Although at this point I'd never seen a wolf in the wild, I had spent time at the Wolf Sanctuary near St. Louis, studying and sketching their wolves.

The smallmouth painting has an interesting story. I was contacted by Tom Rodgers, who was starting an organization called Smallmouth Inc. It was to be a smallmouth bass conservation organization along the lines of Trout Unlimited. He had seen my trout stamp painting and couple other bass paintings that I'd had published in a regional magazine, and wanted me to do a series of four smallmouth paintings for use to publish and sell fundraising limited edition prints. This one, entitled "Smallmouth!", was the first, completed in 1985; the print was published in 1986.

1986. My first experience with limited edition prints had been the MO Trout Stamp, and soon afterward I printed two Ozark paintings, "Vilander Bluff", a landscape in watercolor, and "Biding Time", a bobcat on a ledge. They were only modestly successful. The next prints I came out with were a set of four portraits, "The Wolf", "The Cougar", "The Red Fox", and this one, "The Bobcat". Though simple in execution, they were quite popular.

 Next I printed the pair of wolves here, "Morning Run". This watercolor had a checkered history. I'd already sold the original when we decided to print it. I got it back from the buyer, and in the process of photographing and printing, the painting ended up with a huge scratch on the paper. I was forced to actually paint the image all over again from scratch. Trying to match a painting you've already done is a lot harder than just painting it in the first place!

The third image here, "Ouch!", was a scratchboard. I'd done scratchboard off an on through high school and college, and would go back to it in the next few years. This one was just black and white, but soon I'd be doing them in color.

1987. By 1987 I had won a couple more state trout stamp contests, including my second Missouri win. But trout stamps weren't all that lucrative, while state duck stamps were worth more money. So I entered several duck stamp contests over the years, and came close to winning a couple times, including a top 15 finish in the Federal Duck Stamp contest one year, back when it was easily worth a million dollars to the winning artist. But I never had the affinity for waterfowl that the best of the duck stamp artists did, and to be honest I just wasn't all that interested in ducks, and perhaps it showed. But I did get interested in portraying snow geese in warm light. The almost orange light hitting those white feathers, contrasting with the blue of the shadowed areas, fascinated me and I did several snow goose paintings over the years. This one was always my favorite. It was a large painting done in watercolor. The other painting here, "Heading Home", is another interesting one, in that it was a painting I later redid because I didn't feel like I did it justice on this first try.  You will see the other painting further down.

1988. I was getting more and more into colored scratchboard, and by this time had actually seen elk in the wild, so the result was this painting, "Midnight Call".

The other painting of the red shouldered hawk, however, still used one of the Missouri Ozark landscapes I had experienced, a bluff along the St. Francis River on the edge of the Rockpile Mountain Wilderness Area. The hawk painting was reproduced as a print with modest success, but it was always one of my favorite paintings. Done mostly in transparent watercolor, it was actually a mixed media painting...the sky was executed in soft pastels rubbed vigorously into the paper. I often used the pastels for soft skies back in those days; since the painting in watercolor would be framed under glass anyway, the pastels went well with watercolor.  The subject, a red shouldered hawk, was a fairly rare sight at the time, but I actually saw the bird in that spot.  Now red shouldered hawks are far more common; we've had a pair that nest each year within 75 yards of our Missouri house.

That painting was about 15 X 22 inches, the size of a half sheet of watercolor paper. I very seldom painted much larger, and almost never a full sheet size, though I believe the blue and snow geese painting from 1987 that I showed was done on a full sheet. For one thing, I enjoyed working small and with intricate detail, but the other reason was that smaller paintings were a lot easier to sell! Or maybe I'd just wrongly convinced myself that buyers wouldn't spend the money for a big painting, because when I DID do a larger one I never seemed to have much trouble selling it.

1989. My career was going fairly well. Mary had long since stopped working as a nurse to become my business manager, and we were selling both originals and prints well at various national art shows. I was having a lot of fun painting in watercolor, acrylics, and scratchboard, skipping from one medium to another as the idea for each image came to me. We were partners in our own publishing company, Cedar Creek Publishers, and producing several new prints each year which were selling steadily.

I had just completed two paintings of similar size, a wolf painting and a snow geese image, and we were trying to choose between them for the next print we would publish. I was leaning toward the snow geese, but our partner in the publishing company and Mary both liked the wolf better. There was no doubt that the wolf made more sense, because wolves always sold well and I'd not printed a waterfowl painting yet so we had no idea how well it would sell. But looking at the two paintings strictly from the standpoint of which was better art, I thought the geese painting was the better. Fortunately, Mary prevailed. We printed the wolf painting shown here, "Something in the Air", a 12 X 19 inch watercolor...and it sold out in less than two weeks! Suddenly I was a hot commodity in the world of limited edition prints, and the next few prints we produced sold almost as fast.

Back in those days, many artists and publishing companies marketed these prints as being great investments that would increase in value as the years went by, and customers often bought them purely as investments. We never pushed my prints in that manner--we always told clients to buy it if you like it, not because it might be an investment. But I'm sure a lot of buyers "invested" in my prints in the following few years.

As I said, I was doing acrylics as well as watercolors, and the cooper's hawk and flicker painting, "Zeroing In", was an acrylic. It was most certainly NOT a painting that was produced to sell; predator/prey paintings seldom sold well as prints, but I love doing them and they always find a buyer.

The colored scratchboard, "Belly Deep", was always one of my favorite scratchboards I ever did. Painting the field of foxtail was actually a lot of fun in scratchboard!

1990. It was another eventful year. We moved into our new house on 40 acres from the old farm house in the middle of the settlement of New Offenburg, for one thing. We built the house on the edge of the forest, and there is a huge white oak tree right next to the house, almost touching the back deck. That tree found its way into one of my most successful paintings, "Sultan's Sunrise", which was produced as a very popular print by the National Wild Turkey Federation.

Another event that was not nearly as pleasant also happened in 1990; I fell out of a tree stand while bowhunting, and broke two bones in my arm. During the recovery period I wasn't able to paint effectively, but I found I could at least make pencil drawings. Mary always laughed and said that the immature redtailed hawk on the lizard, "Nailed", perfectly described my mood during the time I was recovering from the broken arm!

By this time I had also been to Alaska, and Alaskan themes began to show up in my paintings. While bowhunting along a small stream on the Alaskan taiga with its rolling hills and spindly spruces, I noticed just a few remains of salmon that had spawned earlier, and imagined a bear roaming along the stream, disappointed that the salmon run was over...hence the painting, "No More Salmon"!

1991. A highlight of this year was going on my first trip to Africa. I was with five other wildlife artists on a 21 day safari to Kenya and Tanzania, put together by Christopher Law, who was publishing the mylar lithographs of artist Dennis Curry, and had set up the trip for us in return for each artist (Dan Smith, Brian Jarvi, Rick Kelly, Gary Moss, Dennis, and me) producing a lithograph. It was an interesting process, where you "draw" each color of the print on a separate sheet of mylar, and then they are all printed into the final image.  But you don't draw in color, you use a pencil to shade in where each color will be, and the darker your pencil shading is, the stronger and darker the color will be on the print.  So you have to imagine a LOT about the colors that will end up in your print.  We printed these in up to 12 colors, and it was a graduate course on color mixing in printmaking.  Here is my offering, "Cheetah's Domain".  

 Africa was an amazing experience. Oddly enough, although we saw every charismatic animal that the continent is known for, I was just as impressed by the bird life. But also oddly enough, when I got back home, it took a long time to process all I'd seen and begin to think about doing paintings of African subjects. In fact, that year I only produced one small African painting, "Lioness in the Grass", 9 X 12 inches, shown here. It was from seeing a lioness with just her upper head showing in tall grass...I didn't even get a good photograph of her, but the whole idea really struck me, and this was a painting I wish I'd done a little bigger.

I was deep in the throes of painting for the print market; after the success of "Something in the Air", everybody was pressuring me to do more wolves. As a kind of protest, I did the moose painting with the wolves far into the background. The title, "Too Much Bull", actually had a double meaning; the obvious one that the prime bull moose was just too much for the wolves to think about attacking, and the hidden one that I was getting tired of the bull of painting what others wanted me to paint!

The third painting here, "Storm Watch", was one that I thought was one of the best I'd ever done up to that point. I don't know whether anybody else thought so.

1992. Up until this point, I'd done mostly watercolors, starting out with pure transparent watercolor (no opaque paint, no whites--if you want any spot on the painting to be white, you have to preserve the white paper without painting on it), and later using transparent colors but also using an opaque white. I'd also made forays into acrylics and of course the scratchboards. But I hadn't been completely comfortable with the process of using acrylics, since they dried so quickly. So I decided to try alkyds. Alkyds, of course, are oil paints but dry more quickly that regular oils, yet much more slowly than acrylics. The otter painting, entitled simply "River Otters", was done in alkyds, and I was as happy with it as any painting I've ever done. The setting, Tieman Shut-in on the St. Francis River, offered endlessly interesting textures of dry and wet rock, moss and algae on the rocks, water both moving and still, not to mention the textures of wet and dry fur on the otters. This painting was completed not long before an article on me appeared in the Missouri Conservationist Magazine, and they used this painting as a wrap-around cover, which is one of the very few wrap-around covers ever done on the Conservationist. It also coincided with the reintroduction of otters into Missouri, something that everybody thought was a great idea at the time, but it was perhaps too successful, and a lot of anglers curse the otters and the Department these days for eating far too many game fish!

The painting of the whitetail buck might look familiar; it was the redo of "Heading Home", which I showed back in the 1987 thread. Compare the two and decide whether I greatly improved upon the first one.

The bass painting was and is entitled "336 Bass"...which deserves an explanation. Beginning in late 1991, I entered into the field of licensing my artwork by signing a contract with a T-shirt company. This was one of the designs they printed, and in fact was not only very successful as a T-shirt, but quickly become the most ripped-off image I'd produced. It seemed like dozens of companies decided they liked 336 Bass and didn't think they needed my permission to use it, and dozens of artists liked it enough to copy it, often right down to the exact same curve of the fins and the plastic worm hanging out of its mouth. The number 336 was simply the catalog number of that T-shirt.

We debated long and hard on whether to license my work--there was a perception out there that "fine artists" didn't put their work on products, that it was somehow too commercial, and if you did it you were an illustrator, not an artist. Well, I finally rejected that idea for one big reason. The object of art, or at least my own goal, was to say something with my artwork and HAVE PEOPLE SEE IT. It has always seemed to me that the more people that see it and see what I'm trying to say, the better.

1993. This was a year when I thought I did some of my best paintings in the extremely realistic style I was practicing then. I was also becoming well-traveled, with trips to the Western national parks and hunting trips to western Colorado, which gave me more inspiration for paintings. But the Ozarks and the area around our house were still common in my paintings. I was being represented by Decoys and Wildlife Gallery in Frenchtown, NJ, and their clients ran the gamut from those interested in eastern woodland scenes (similar to the Ozarks) and those who were buying Western critters and landscapes.

The deer painting, "Southern Exposure", was set in the cedar glades near my home in Ste. Genevieve County, and became a very popular print. It was done in alkyds.

The turkey, "Spring Beauties", a watercolor, was inspired by the woods right behind my house, and in fact I did parts of it "on location", taking my easel out to a rocky outcrop a hundred yards from the house to do the rocks in the foreground. I also brought in a pile of dead leaves and very meticulously painted them as they slowly settled on my table. The name has a double meaning; the flowers in the foreground are spring beauties, Claytonia virginica, but to the gobbler, the hens are spring beauties as well!

The wolf painting, "Renewal", a watercolor, also has a double meaning. This was when wolves were beginning to increase in numbers in Yellowstone National Park, a renewal of a native species--the setting of the painting is in Yellowstone. But the wolf pups represent a renewal as well. This was a painting where I didn't really have good reference for either the pups or the "baby-sitter" wolf they are swarming, so I mostly made up their poses.

The final painting, "High Plains Drifter", is an alkyd set in the area of western Colorado where my brothers-in-law and I bowhunted for elk and mule deer for several years. The bird is a prairie falcon, which hunts by flying fairly low and fast over the terrain, instantly changing direction to attack the prey it surprises; a very different strategy from the much better known peregrine falcon. I watched a prairie falcon hunting in that exact area while bowhunting.

1994. By this point, we had shut down our own publishing company and had been invited to join Hadley House Publishers, one of the top limited edition print publishers at the time. The painting of a mother cougar and her kittens, "Childs' Play", was one of the first prints they published. The background is a composite of many photos of various pieces of landscape taken mostly in Yellowstone Park.

We had also began a relationship with the Hamilton Collection, a fine art plate company, and the wolves, "North Song", was a painting commissioned by Hamilton, set in Denali National Park in Alaska, the first place I'd ever seen wolves in the wild. I would later spend a lot of time watching them in Yellowstone.

The bobcat was just a fun painting to do, and one I was very pleased with at the time (and I still am). I really just enjoy doing mossy rocks!

1995 was an odd year. I found in looking back through my paintings that I really didn't do many major works that year; I was actually too busy creating t-shirt designs, as the t-shirt company was selling shirts with my images like crazy and demanding more images. The timber rattler shown here was one of those t-shirt images. I did most of them with art pens of various colors on smooth archival paper. The kind of pens I used had brush-shaped nibs with sharp points, and were water-soluble.

The two major paintings I did do were "Boys' Club", the whitetail deer painting, and "Ladies' Choice", the wood duck painting. Both were settings near my house. In the deer painting I used our warm season grass field in front of the house, but inserted an old barn that was actually a few miles away. In the wood duck painting, I specifically went out to Bismarck Lake, a small local lake where the Conservation Department had put up a bunch of wood duck nesting boxes. Both foreground and background were partially done while sitting in a canoe on the lake.

If 1995 was an off year for me as far as major originals, 1996 was just the opposite. I produced a number of paintings I was very happy with. The eagle painting, "American Odyssey", was set up in Alton, Illinois, along the Mississippi River, which had been a famous place to watch eagles in the winter for many years. Now eagles are common on all the larger streams in Missouri, but back then they were just beginning to show up in numbers on other streams.

The loon painting, "Outside of Time", was just a fun one to do and play around with nighttime colors and a campfire.

"Quicksilver", the bass painting, almost drove me nuts putting in all the little shad. I was trying to capture the strobe-like effect of the sunlight reflecting off the scattering shad, and I've always thought it was one of my better bass paintings.

Finally, "Playtime" was a further exploration of wolf pups playing with an adult, something similar to "Renewal", which I featured in an earlier post.

1997 was a year of variety and perhaps the beginning of transitions. My bread and butter was still highly realistic, detailed watercolors (using transparent colors but with an opaque white called Pen-opake, for the artists out there--I would mix the Pen-opake, a very thin but opaque white made for pens and airbrushes, with various colors to get many of my effects. The thinness of the Pen-opake really lent itself to getting fine detail). Such a painting was "Birds of a Feather", the cardinal painting where I used the fencerow in front of our Missouri house for the setting.

But I decided to try something a bit different for me, an oil with a bit of looseness, and especially not worrying about using much if any reference, just make it up as I went along. That was "River Dance", a jaguar leaping toward an egret. I'd done enough jaguars by this time to have a good idea of the spot patterns and the shape of the cat, so I just painted it. And since I've never been to the Central/South American rain forests that are this cat's usual home, I also made up the background foliage, just assuming that somewhere within the cat's range there would be palmettos and other plants something like I was familiar with in Florida. I did this painting in alkyds, and I thought it turned out pretty well for an experiment.

And I made another change, or rather I began to branch out to a very different subject matter, with "Time Well Spent", a fly fishing scene using the West Boulder River in Montana as the background. I'd occasionally done portraits before, but very seldom a painting with humans in it, at least not since I was in college and doing fantasy paintings with Conan the Barbarian type heroes. But in 1996 I'd started a tradition of fly fishing in Montana each year, and I was turned on both by the landscape and by the beautiful act of fly fishing.

The guy in the painting is my buddy Tom Manion, who introduced me to Montana fly fishing (and tied all my flies for my first trip). The woman in the background is artist friend Bruce Miller's wife Deb, from photos I took of her when we had fly fished many years previously in Michigan after an art show.

And finally, what is still one of my truest favorite fish paintings, not only because I think I really captured everything about the underwater landscape of an Ozark stream, but because smallmouth bass are still my favorite fish--"Sunlight on Bronze".

I continued the further experimentation with the alkyds in 1998 with a couple large paintings. "Water Music" was a second exploration of otters in a St. Francis River (Missouri) landscape, this time after a hike I'd done along the river after a long spate of cold weather, where there was plenty of ice on the river to make things more interesting.

"Master of Light and Shadow", the cougar painting, was set in a bit different landscape than your usual image of this big North American cat--the Pacific Northwest rain forest. It gave me a wonderful opportunity to paint sunlight filtering through the foliage and a lot of moss.

But the most interesting shift in my work in 1998 was that I was FINALLY ready to start painting African subjects. I'd gone to Africa for the first time 7 years before, but amazingly had only done a couple paintings from that trip. I was extremely impressed with Africa, but it was like the whole thing had to germinate for a few years before I thought I could do it all justice. But one day in 1998 I just sat down and looked through the hundreds of photos I'd taken on that trip, and decided to do an oryx with a landscape from Samburu Park in Kenya. "Samburu Sunset" sold immediately at Decoys and Wildlife Gallery in New Jersey; it's always nice when you get that kind of encouragement.

I think I mentioned in another post how much I'd been impressed by the bird life in Africa. So I guess it only made sense that my second African painting in 1998 featured superb starlings. I always thought that if the non-native starlings we have in America, originally from Europe, had looked like the African version of a starling, we'd love them a lot more. But I wanted something a little different from a simple bird painting, hence "The Air Up There", with the giraffe in the background. I took a page from Robert Bateman's book in that painting, putting, to paraphrase what I've heard him say, about a mile of atmosphere between the starlings in the foreground and the giraffe in the background, in order to give the painting depth.

In 1999 I was really into painting African subjects, and having success selling some really major African paintings. We had seen leopards on my first trip, and it was only natural that a leopard would quickly find its way into a painting once I started painting African subjects. But the painting "Storm Brewing" was also a celebration of how it was in the parks of Kenya and Tanzania. The first day after we flew into Nairobi we were driving a long way across Kenya to a spot near the Tanzanian border, mostly through settled (and often overpopulated) country, when we saw a giraffe a long way off. Dennis Curry, being the only one of us six wildlife artist who was experienced in Africa, ignored it, but the rest of us were clamoring for the driver to stop so we could photograph it. Dennis said, "Forget it, you'll see a million of them." And that turned out to be almost true. I'd take a photo of a particular animal, but when I got home and had the film developed I was surprised to find a bunch of other animals in the background. So it is with this painting, with the zebras in the background as part of the landscape, not the real subject matter.

"Deadly Intent", the lion painting, was probably one of my most ambitious projects up to this point. Capturing the fleeing zebras and wildebeasts, with dust flying, the lionesses attacking, and the one poor zebra cut out of the herd and trying to flee in terror took a lot of drawing and sketching, since with all the photos I'd taken of these animals, I'd never gotten any photo even remotely close to the positions of the animals in this painting. Plus I'd never really done dust before.

But as much as I was enjoying doing African wildlife, the turkey painting, "The Road Less Traveled", became one of my most popular paintings of all. And I saw that scene, almost exactly like that, when Mary and I were walking along a gravel road three miles from our house on morning. I didn't have a camera. But the picture of those gobblers, the sunlight shining THROUGH their neck wattles and throwing long shadows of their bodies, was etched in my mind, and I had enough confidence in my abilities to do the painting without reference. The shadows actually gave me the most trouble, and I ended up sculpting turkeys in these positions out of modeling clay, and shining a light on them in the same direction and seeing what the shape of the shadows turned out to be.

I was also painting for the print market, and "Confrontation" was done with limited edition prints in mind, since it depicts a Minnesota/Wisconsin type of landscape and people from those states were some of the best customers for prints. But I had a lot of fun doing it, capturing the moody atmosphere and soft snowfall, the thin snow on the ground and on the backs of the bucks, and the thick autumn and winter coats of these northern whitetails. However, this painting almost turned into a disaster. After I finished this acrylic, I applied a different kind of varnish than what I usually did, and somehow it made the snow turn YELLOW! I had to try to clean it off as much as possible, and then repaint all the snow.

I think in 2000 I was at the top of my game in painting African subjects, and was quickly selling everything I painted, so I did a lot of African stuff. Mary and I spent the turn of the century sitting in our hot tub, though we were actually rather sick with the flu, and toasting the coming millennium, and it started out very well. The giraffe painting, "Twixt Daylight and Dark", was one of the smaller paintings I did in 2000, only 12 X 24 inches, but it was one of Mary's favorites.

Much bigger, and one of my personal favorites, was "Crossing Guard", from a scene I saw along a river in Samburu National Park in Kenya. The red dirt of that area actually stains the elephants into that rich reddish color, and I thought the red of the river and the red of the elephants perfectly matched. I also think it captures the power and gentleness of these magnificent creatures about as well as it's possible to do so.

But my most ambitious painting, and the one that came closest to driving me crazy, was "You Can Lead a Zebra to Water...". That's a lot of stripes!

The final painting, "A Quiet Place", was commissioned by William Shatner of Star Trek fame. It happened over the holidays the year before, when we had several people at the house when the phone rang. Mary answered and a lady asked if this was the artist's residence. Mary said it was but that I was not available at the moment, her standard response because I'm not good at phone conversations, especially business ones. The lady said, "I'm William Shatner's personal assistant, and he would like to speak with Mr. Agnew." Now, I'm a Star Trek fan, and Mary really thought that somebody was playing a joke on me at first. But it turned out to be true, and he had seen a similar painting of mine somewhere, I think on a Christmas card, and wanted to commission a cougar in a snowy nighttime mountain scene. I got to meet him at his horse farm in Kentucky when I delivered the painting.

2001...I guess everybody old enough to remember it has their 9-11 stories from 2001, but whenever I see the elk painting, "Frosty Morning", I think of 9-11. My friend Bruce Miller and I had planned a trip to southwestern Colorado to photograph fall colors in the Rockies in late September, and when 9-11 happened, not only were we appalled at what the group of terrorists had wrought, but it was beginning to look like our flight out there would be cancelled. As it was, the airways got back to the new normal in time for us to go, but the vastly heightened security was far different from what we were used to. The background of "Frosty Morning" was done from photos taken on that trip, and was the first painting I did when I got back home. It was a small painting, 12 X 16 inches, but I really loved the way it turned out, and really wished I'd done it much bigger.

"Breaking Cover", the moose painting, was done from a very blurry print photograph that I'd taken on my first trip to Alaska. We had been driving the highway from Anchorage to Denali when this small bull moose crossed the road in front of us, and I hurriedly snapped the photo. Though blurry, the play of the sunlight on the moose's body and the shadows its rather unimpressive antlers threw on its body always intrigued me. So I transplanted the moose to the Grand Tetons, made it a lot bigger and heavier with larger antlers, and finally was able to paint it.

The cougar painting, "Dominion", has a background from old photos as well, this time from western Colorado where I had gone bowhunting for several years more than 10 years previously. It was another of my personal favorite paintings. The cougar's position was taken from one of the house cats we had for many years. Hazel was a short-haired blonde tabby cat that had a wild streak a mile wide; she wanted attention, but when you tried to pet her she got uneasy, and if you tried to pick her up she would suddenly sprout about a thousand sharp claws all at once. But she was a very active, athletic cat, and I used her as a model for several paintings of wild cats. A house cat, especially one like Hazel, moves much the same as most wild cats and does a lot of the same things, so all you have to do is change proportions and color; the musculature remains pretty much the same.

I produced a lot of my personal favorite paintings in 2001, and another is "Into the Night", the lion painting. This one has an odd history. Mary and I had been invited to a huge private game reserve and resort in Zimbabwe, and our thatch-roofed cabin was within sight of a small pond. Elephants would come to the pond at night, never during the day. One night we heard them splashing in the pond. There was a bright, nearly full moon, and we stepped out to watch them. We could see them plainly, and as they splashed and blew water upon their backs with their trunks, the water would gleam like a mass of diamonds in the moonlight. I remembered that, and decided to capture the feel of that night, though with a different animal. No splash, but just the little highlights of moon reflections on the water.