The Secret Angler

The Angling Times has published  a piece about the EA’s pension investments in the water utilities, based on some ferreting by Feargal Sharkey in his campaign to stop them polluting the rivers. I doubt, however, that ‘anglers are flabbergasted’ over this snippet of financial information. In common with most people, the minutiae of pension fund management passes them by.

It does seem galling that an organisation that is meant to protect the environment from corporate pollution should invest in significant sources of that pollution. Yet this is an issue for all pension holders. Funds must be invested to provide a reasonable pension for its members. Apart from water utilities, tobacco and oil companies are also favourites. The reason is because such companies generate plenty of cash. What they are selling is always in demand. Water companies are a particularly good source of dosh because they have a captive market and no competition. If you fancy an easy number as CEO of a big firm, they’re the employers to plump for. After privatisation by the Conservative government in 1989, they’ve been a gold mine. I once met the retired boss of Anglian Water, a salmon fisherman, who had clearly done well from it. You just have to look at the salaries trousered by the current crop to see that.

The EA pension fund invests in water company bonds rather than shares (except for United Utilities, arch polluters of the northwest), that is they loan money to them, which sounds even worse, especially when you realise that water companies have been borrowing to sustain dividend payments rather than invest in the infrastructure needed to avoid dumping large quantities of sewage into our rivers. Bonds produce a good income which is always needed by pension funds to meet payments.

The EA is not the only outfit to compromise itself. A few years back the Wild Trout Trust handed Thames Water a greenwashing opportunity by allowing it to sponsor the conservation awards. That strikes me as even worse. Then again, it’s a question of money and this never floods into angling conservation coffers.

So in a way we’re all stuck. The nature of capitalism is that the environment plays second fiddle to money, most of which finds its way into the big pockets of people like water company bosses and those with plenty of capital. I don’t think the EA should invest in the water utilities, clearly a conflict of interest. I suspect the EA pension fund trustees are unlikely to see it that way, unless they’re anglers or wild swimmers.

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Painters of fish and fishing scenes are more numerous than you might expect. In America especially there are many who depict dramatic fish scenes and angling landscapes, which appear regularly in magazines like Sport Fishing and Gray’s Sporting Journal. In British magazines photography takes precedence but there are occasional reproductions of the work of painters in this country.

The majority are technically skilled, some exceptionally so, but I often ask myself whether they are artists or illustrators, or worse, producers of fishing clichés. The leaping salmon, the basking carp or the pike pursuing its prey are frequent subjects. There is something inherently corny about them; I suspect they are produced mainly because there is a bigger market for such works. The fish are always on the turn, or pursuing a lure and that’s the way anglers like to see fish, even though fish spend a lot of time barely moving. I once spoke to a painter selling beachscapes alongside his other work that struck me as genuine art. He told me that he has to produce these because they sell the best. Who really wants to suffer poverty for their art?

These thoughts came back to me listening to one of Fly Culture’s podcasts. The regular interviews conducted by the editor tend to be too long to listen to in full but I listened to all the recent hour and a half of David Miller. Now Miller is one of the exceptional technicians I referred to above, perhaps the best in the country. His thoughts and doubts over the merit of his art were therefore very interesting. Of all the fish painters, I feel he is one of the few who deserves to be called an artist. This prompts the eternal question of what is art. I recall seeing one of his paintings for the first time, the actual painting, not a reproduction on his website as in the image above, and the feeling I had was one of being startled. Miller captures something about fish, their essence or fishness, or to be more exact, the emotions that fish stir within himself. He also captures the waterscape better than anyone I’ve seen.

Yet he only gives himself 5 out of 10 at best, and wonders how to go about rendering the otherness and magnificence of, say, a salmon. When I look at a Miller I usually feel that I am looking at a hyperreal photograph, although screen images exaggerate this effect. The precision of technique, the fine detail in not only the fish but the substrate of the riverbed, sometimes gives the effect of artificiality. As Miller spends a lot of time underwater, diving to get a true vision of fish in their world, I am inclined to assume this is what the aquatic world is like. Certainly when I have seen in a shoal of fish in very clear water on a sunny day, the strange transparency of his paintings makes sense.

An artist skilled with a paint brush has a big advantage but this alone is not enough. It’s not for me to say how Miller can reach further into his studies of fish because I am not an artist. I do wonder whether exactness of form implies diminishing artistic returns. The writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez once lamented that the more words he expended on a description, the further he got away from the reality. The art lies not in precision of image as in a photograph but in the capture of the artist’s inner vision.

Picasso used his acute drawing ability not to render objects perfectly but to capture exactly his own view of the world. I’m not suggesting Miller should start painting angular fish with eyes on the tail, though a difference of approach may be what he is looking for. In the meantime, when I want to buy a fish painting to hang on my wall it is going to be a David Miller.