The Secret Angler

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.

You sometimes hear say you need a holiday to get over the holiday you’ve just had. Travel is often the worst part of it, even on British roads, what with the tailgaters, speeders and assorted arseholes who at some point managed to fool a driving examiner. But apart from the getting there, a holiday in the Yorkshire Dales should be peaceful, you would think. That’s where I’ve just been, not so much fishing but walking and looking at the rivers that flow across their rocky beds.

Alas, the Dales are not so peaceful thanks to numerous motorbikes that rumble and scream around the narrow roads, audible wherever you happen to be, even at the top of the hills. What’s this to do with angling? I’m thinking of the enthusiasm for old bikes expressed on fishing forums, the kind of machines that sound like a herd of flatulent cattle on approach, and smell like a petrol spill as they recede. There are plenty of examples on the Yorkshire roads, as well as the rumble of the big European bikes and scream of the Japanese two-wheelers, preferred by the younger riders who still believe they have a spare leg to lose.

The majority of riders, however, are old men, red-faced, bandy-legged, who only dismount to visit a greasy spoon to refuel their considerable bellies. In the little Yorkshire towns I watched their top-heavy waddle in leathers for the few yards of which they’re capable. Most are singletons; I wouldn’t be surprised if their little white beards have been repelling women for years. They like to ride around in small groups or gangs, which seems pointless considering they cannot talk to each other for many miles. I saw a bunch of riders with insignia on their backs, death’s head included, reminiscent of the criminal gangs on two wheels. Looking them up I discovered they are all service veterans offering a ‘true brotherhood’, although it takes ‘a long time’ — overtones of initiations. Regimental camaraderie insufficient? Unable to form relationships with partners?

The older leathermen do tend to ride at a slower pace; they’ve held on to four limbs all these years and want to keep it that way. The noise they make is still much louder than cars but not so much as the rising and falling scream of the yoof who know only two throttle positions, fully open and shut. Like children in kindergarten, they love the racket of a noisy toy. The dangers in this kind of riding show up in the statistics and I once witnessed the aftermath. The rear pannier was still rocking in the road when I drove up one winter’s night. The bike lay on its side, engine screaming and sending a pall of white smoke high into the air. The rider lay on the tarmac, one leg tapering to nothing. A thick pool of liquid, black under the sodium street lights, oozed from under his body. We called an ambulance and competent first aiders were quickly on the scene, but his motorcycling days were over.

Of course many people are unable to learn by example or have the imagination to think it could happen to them. For the walkers, the cyclists, the fishermen, all the mechanical noise pollution is ruining the Dales. Locals rejoiced during the lockdown when the biker tourists, literally touring with nowhere to go, had to stay home. They despair now the bikes are back on the quiet roads where their racket has the most impact.

All this motorised frivolity is an anachronism. Time they got off their arses and took up walking or cycling. That’s the way to see the landscapes of the Dales. They’ll live longer and look less ugly. And if you’re an angler indulging a passion for petrol consumption, keep in mind the disturbance you’re causing to other anglers in the river valley you’re roaring down. The rest of us can look forward to when the combustion engine is past and motorbikes in the country, outsized 4-wheel-drives in supermarket car parks, dumb blokes driving cars on the telly and all the rest of it are banished. Then we really can study to be quiet.