I received the following this morning from Bob White, the illustrator for John Gierach’s columns for the past  16 years. Thought many of you might find it interesting:

Above: The painting—”Quitting Early”—that illustrated John Gierach’s first Sporting Life column in Fly Rod and Reel. (March, 1992)

As some of you may know, the current issue of Fly Rod & Reel magazine marks my one-hundredth column with John Gierach. Our very first collaboration occurred twenty years ago, in July of 1988, when I illustrated his article “East Big Fish” for what was then called Rod and Reel.

After Lee Wulff’s tragic death in 1991, the editors at Rod & Reel asked John to write the magazine’s closing column, and they asked me to illustrate it. Our first regular column together, “The Sporting Life,” was published in March of 1992. This July marks our 100th column together, and I wanted to do a painting of John fishing his home water to commemorate that event.

Today’s image is that painting, and is titled “Close To Home”.

To mark the event, Lisa has created a 100 Painting Retrospective and for the very first time, visitors to our website will be able to review all 100 paintings from John’s columns in one place.

When she suggested that we build this retrospective, I found the idea both exciting and frightening. Did I really want people to look back over sixteen years of my artwork and be able to compare and contrast what I did then with what I’m doing now? In the end I decided that we all start somewhere, and if I wasn’t getting better at what I do… then I should be doing something else. Besides, I like some of the early paintings as much as I do the recent work.

To see Bob’s work, visit www.whitefishstudio.com