Untitled, oil, $30,000
Russell Chatham was born in San Francisco on October 27, 1939. He lived in the city until 1949 when his family moved to San Anselmo, or more specifically, Sleepy Hollow, where he spent the next twelve years. Then, for the following eleven years, he worked and lived in Marshall, San Rafael, San Anselmo, Black Point, Bolinas, and Nicasio, earning his living as a sign painter and cabinet maker/carpenter. In the spring of 1972, he moved to Livingston, Montana, as a painter and author, Chatham is self-taught. He is the grandson of the great landscape painter Gottardo Piazzoni.
He began exhibiting formally in 1959, and since then has had something on the order of four hundred one man shows at museums, art centers, private galleries, schools, colleges and universities not only through the west in places like Sun Valley, Aspen, Santa Fe and Denver, but also in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, San Francisco and Los Angeles. His work has also been exhibited in Europe and Asia. Chatham began printmaking in 1981, and is today regarded as one of the world’s foremost lithographers.
Publications about Chatham include a catalogue called “One Hundred Paintings”, and another about his original lithographs called “The Missouri Headwaters”. Chatham has been profiled in Esquire, Southwest Art, People, U.S. Art, Antiques and Fine Art, Architectural Digest, Smart, The Denver Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Associated Press, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, and Fresh Air, PBS and CBS Sunday Morning.
Chatham’s writing includes hundreds of articles, short stories, essays and reviews about fly fishing, bird hunting and conservations as well as a number of pieces on food and wine. Since 1967 his work has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic, men’s Journal, Outside, Sports Afield, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Fly Fisherman, Fly Rod and Reel, as well as in dozens of newspapers and smaller specialty magazines. His books include “The Anglers Coast”, “Silent Seasons”, and “Dark Waters”. He is the founder and publisher of Clark City Press, which, since 1989, has published thirty-five books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art, photography, and children’s classics, all of which gave the Livingston-based company a sound national reputation.
Russell Chatham died in November 2019.
He began exhibiting formally in 1959, and since then has had something on the order of four hundred one man shows at museums, art centers, private galleries, schools, colleges and universities not only through the west in places like Sun Valley, Aspen, Santa Fe and Denver, but also in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Chicago, Seattle, Dallas, San Francisco and Los Angeles. His work has also been exhibited in Europe and Asia. Chatham began printmaking in 1981, and is today regarded as one of the world’s foremost lithographers.
Publications about Chatham include a catalogue called “One Hundred Paintings”, and another about his original lithographs called “The Missouri Headwaters”. Chatham has been profiled in Esquire, Southwest Art, People, U.S. Art, Antiques and Fine Art, Architectural Digest, Smart, The Denver Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Seattle Times, The Associated Press, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, and Fresh Air, PBS and CBS Sunday Morning.
Chatham’s writing includes hundreds of articles, short stories, essays and reviews about fly fishing, bird hunting and conservations as well as a number of pieces on food and wine. Since 1967 his work has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic, men’s Journal, Outside, Sports Afield, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Fly Fisherman, Fly Rod and Reel, as well as in dozens of newspapers and smaller specialty magazines. His books include “The Anglers Coast”, “Silent Seasons”, and “Dark Waters”. He is the founder and publisher of Clark City Press, which, since 1989, has published thirty-five books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art, photography, and children’s classics, all of which gave the Livingston-based company a sound national reputation.
Russell Chatham died in November 2019.
Depot, gouache, $18,450
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Deep Creek, acrylic, $4000
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What is an original lithograph?
"Most people assume an original lithograph is a print of something else, and that there is an original which has either been copied somehow or been photographed and reproduced through some mechanical technique. There is definitely a basis for this assumption because thousands of such reproductions have been sold as limited edition prints, but are in fact nothing more than photographs of paintings printed on regular commercial presses using the ordinary technology known as four-color process printing…..
To understand what an original lithograph is, you need to know how one is produced. First of all, there is no original. There is, however, a concept which lives inside the artist’s head. Think of it as a brick wall. You know where it’s going to be, how long, high, and wide. You have mortar and bricks, maybe a stretched string so it comes out straight. Then you start laying bricks until it’s done. How many bricks did it take? Who cares, it took exactly how many were needed, no more, no less. The point is that the wall only came into existence when it was done and not before.
The first step in bringing forth the imagined image is to create a drawing, which will serve as the first key plate, usually, but not always, printed in black ink. This first plate acts as a map for everything that follows, so it much be done carefully. As with watercolor painting, lithographic inks are completely transparent, and so you cannot make corrections. Following this first drawing plate are the colors, one at a time, each a separate plate drawn by hand. These plates could take as little as twenty or thirty minutes to make, or as long as twenty or thirty hours depending on their complexity. The number of colors, or plates, used in any given lithograph is never the same. It simply takes how many it takes. In my work, that number has varied from seventeen to fifty-four in the production of more than one hundred and thirty editions over the course of the last thirty years.
Generally speaking, you can print two colors in a day if there are no complications, however, there usually are. Each ink color must be mixed by eye using the primary colors, and what you see on the mixing table is often not what you get on the paper. When this happens, modifications have to be made, you have to clean up and start over. To make one original lithograph can easily require two-hundred hours of both the printer’s and the artist’s time."
- Russell Chatham
To understand what an original lithograph is, you need to know how one is produced. First of all, there is no original. There is, however, a concept which lives inside the artist’s head. Think of it as a brick wall. You know where it’s going to be, how long, high, and wide. You have mortar and bricks, maybe a stretched string so it comes out straight. Then you start laying bricks until it’s done. How many bricks did it take? Who cares, it took exactly how many were needed, no more, no less. The point is that the wall only came into existence when it was done and not before.
The first step in bringing forth the imagined image is to create a drawing, which will serve as the first key plate, usually, but not always, printed in black ink. This first plate acts as a map for everything that follows, so it much be done carefully. As with watercolor painting, lithographic inks are completely transparent, and so you cannot make corrections. Following this first drawing plate are the colors, one at a time, each a separate plate drawn by hand. These plates could take as little as twenty or thirty minutes to make, or as long as twenty or thirty hours depending on their complexity. The number of colors, or plates, used in any given lithograph is never the same. It simply takes how many it takes. In my work, that number has varied from seventeen to fifty-four in the production of more than one hundred and thirty editions over the course of the last thirty years.
Generally speaking, you can print two colors in a day if there are no complications, however, there usually are. Each ink color must be mixed by eye using the primary colors, and what you see on the mixing table is often not what you get on the paper. When this happens, modifications have to be made, you have to clean up and start over. To make one original lithograph can easily require two-hundred hours of both the printer’s and the artist’s time."
- Russell Chatham
Interested in learning more about Russell Chatham? Watch the recorded panel discussion "The Life and Lithography of Russell Chatham" with Chatham's daughter Lea Chatham, his printer Geoff Harvey, and friend and fellow artist Parks Reece, moderated by Livingston Artist Storrs Bishop.