As both sportsman and art lover, my walls battle for either mounted heads or country scenes. Oddly, though, I own no wildlife art. Before visiting John Schoenherr I wasn’t sure why. Now I am. Over the years, most wildlife has seemed partisan to me, as though the...
It has always seemed to me that any man is a better man for being a hunter. I have said that my hunting has often been solitary; but that was chiefly in the early days. During the last 25 years, I have rarely taken to the woods and fields in the shooting season...
“You don’t decide on a style…you do the work and a style evolves.” Over the years, I have had the luck to interview some very talented wildlife artists. A number actually hunted, others did not. In the work of those that did, I discovered...
For Joshua Spies, it’s about payback. Across the lonesome, windblown prairie of northern mid-America, locals know him simply as “the kid.” On this morning, the prodigal artistic son of Watertown, South Dakota, stands in his studio surrounded by six...
To elicit thoughtful reflection … to trigger an emotional response, these are the things McKissick seeks in his art. Of course you can’t always tell a book by its cover — nor a painter by his paintings. Take Randall McKissick, for example. With just a...
Almost every trapper past middle age who has spent his life in the wilderness has stories to tell about exceptionally savage bears. One of these stories was told in my ranch house one evening by an old mountain hunter, clad in fur cap, buckskin hunting shirt, and...
“I decided awhile back that I wouldn’t paint any animal unless I’d seen it first.” It’s a dangerous trap to fall into, but I’d formed quite a few impressions about Michael Sieve through his paintings long before I ever met him. You hear...
Harris-Ching is one of the handful of artists who advanced the position of wildlife painting into a serious artistic genre. The ground is tinder dry, the air is suffocating — infuriatingly unlike air — more like the fug under a woolen blanket. Under the midday sun,...
Kenneth Douglas Stuart Anderson (1910-1974) was an Anglo-Indian who spent most of his life in Bangalore, India. An avid hunter, he was fascinated by the subcontinent’s big cats, and most of his tales dealt with the drama and dangers of man-killing tigers and...
“Three Toes,” said an old rancher, with a kind of reverence, “is the fastest, longest-winded wolf that ever lived.” A smile swept across the craggy, weather-beaten face of Clyde F. Briggs as he read a telegram from the U. S, Biological Survey:...
