Bob White has been a fly-fishing and wingshooting guide in Alaska and Argentina, and he has hunted and fished—and painted—worldwide. His works, presented in a large-format coffee-table book, The Classic Sporting Art of Bob White, show an uncanny ability to transport the viewer to stunningly beautiful places and to the heart of sport.
White, the book’s author, cites many sporting artists as influences and calls the late Ogden Pleissner “a mentor I never met.” Over the past decade White gradually has switched from watercolor to oil painting, with his work becoming “looser and more impressionistic.”
Prairies, marshes, winding rivers, rocky coastlines and jagged mountains. Weather, landscape, water and even mud come alive under his brush. “I paint what I live,” White writes, and he accompanies many of the 246 images with text passages that “tell the story behind the scene.” Also included are 10 of White’s favorite illustrated essays.
The book has sections on fly-fishing, upland gunning, waterfowling and how White presents “the mood the weather projects on the landscape.” He writes: “When I begin a painting, the sky and the weather it bears are always my first considerations.” And he really nails those aspects—which for most of us embody the core of the sporting experience and our interactions with and immersions in land and nature.
The Classic Sporting Art of Bob White is a 280-page hardcover with a foreword by Tom Rosenbauer and text contributed by John Gierach and E. Donnall Thomas Jr. Signed copies are available for $75, and a limited edition of 300 ($150) include an original pencil drawing on the title page. Visit bobwhitestudio.com.
