Leather jackets, Italian sports-car upholstery, hand-tooled equestrian tack, and a broken-in pair of Justin boots; the list of favorite leather objects is endless.  Whatever it may be, each article has the power to transform. Catch and throw a pigskin and suddenly you’re Joe Montana. Pull on a pair of cowboy boots and you swagger like John Wayne. Shrug on a well-worn bomber jacket and—voilá—you’re Marlon Brando. Who can resist the smell of newly oiled leather, the unmistakable creaking of a western saddle, or the feel of a quality baseball glove?

So the fact that Lance Boen chose leather as a sculpture medium is understandable. Creating larger-than-life fish sculptures from leather is unique and impressive.

The first aspect that strikes you about the artist is his height. He is six feet seven and moves with the fluid grace of an athlete. Lance excelled in basketball and volleyball, but his true passion was fishing. Boen grew up 50 miles from downtown Los Angeles. His backyard was Mount Baldy just east of L.A., far enough from the city to offer the purity of Nature and a spring-fed pond.

“As a boy, I spent hours jumping rocks and boulders along a creek near my house carrying a little orange bucket and a fishing rod,” Lance said. He used the bucket to carry the fish he caught back to the pond in front of his home, where he could study their behavior. “I watched them grow, how they broke the surface as they gulped insects.  Sometimes I shared my lunch with them. One fish would take chips from my fingers. My pond and the nearby streambed were the ultimate playground of my childhood.”

Like many of us, Lance was introduced to trout fishing by his grandfather. The family spent vacations in the eastern Sierra at the family cabin along Independence Creek in the shadow of  Mount Whitney. There young Boen used a fly rod to tease trout with a worm. He learned to read the water and to find the hiding places of planted fish.

When he was 12 years old, a friend’s brother taught him to tie a fly. He took his first fly to the creek and caught a 13-inch rainbow. He slipped it in his orange bucket and released it into his spring pond. The rainbow lived for several years, teaching Lance the ways of trout and the mysteries of aquatic life.

In seventh grade Lance used his fly-tying skills to amaze his friends. He caught and released the classroom goldfish with a fly he tied using a staple tied with carpet fibers. A straightened paperclip was his rod and sewing thread his line. The teacher was not as thrilled as his classmates.

As he grew older, his experience burst forth through art.  “In high school I was in the Advanced Placement Art program,” Lance said. “We had to create a body of work to be judged for college credit. I chose fish as my theme and used acrylics, watercolors, colored pencils and for the three dimensional pieces I worked in clay.”

While attending the University of La Verne, Lance explored abstract and surreal subject matter. He became a premier painter in both acrylics and oils, which won him the Artist’s Achievement award in his senior year. After graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree he was admitted into the Master of Fine Arts program at the prestigious Claremont Graduate University in California. Here, he transitioned from painting to sculpture, and was awarded a scholarship for his excellence in art; his work was shown throughout southern California at galleries, universities and museums.

Lance opened his own studio gallery after receiving his Masters degree in Fine Art. Early work consisted of life-sized trout and bass. His sculpture was gaining the attention of art collectors and requests for other species and commissioned pieces were keeping him busy. Today, Lance creates larger-than-life works, each one original. A piece requires weeks of work to complete.

The artist now works in his self-designed, newly constructed studio gallery in Carmel Valley, California. It’s a large, open beamed, airy structure built next to his home. His fish are displayed between the windows and swim along the beams. There are Grouper, Dorado, Striped Marlin, Permit, Bonefish, and Steelhead. Piles of leather are stacked near an industrial sewing machine and views of the mountains tease the eye from every window. It is a comfortable space, open to visitors—a waterless aquarium.

At work on a sculpture, Lance paints with oil dyes to bring the color of the fish to life. Each layer soaks into the last and the result is a depth of pigment that is so real it’s as if the specimen is freshly netted. They are viewed as three-dimensional paintings. The pattern is hand drawn and the characteristics hand tooled. Lance finds the feature that most typifies the species and emphasizes it. It might be the scales, or the lateral line. Each face is a mask made separately from the body. The sculptures are anatomically correct but the size exaggerated.

“They are not a textbook reproduction,” Boen said. “I take one element and push the beauty of those markings. My sculptures are the essence of the creature—a fine art piece. I like to show the stitching and tooling. I want my patrons to have an art experience wherein they can enjoy seeing their fish brought forth in a transformable medium that gives character and new life.”
When he can slip away from the studio, Boen can be found steelheading on one of California’s central coast rivers: “I spend more time walking the river to find them than I actually do catching them some days. When you do hook a Steelhead it’s exciting. They’re wild and elusive.”

In his zeal he fashioned a 10-foot leather sculpture of his quarry complete with a full-sized western saddle. (To see this remarkable creation see www.fishandflymagazine.com then click on editor, October 2003.) It’s the first piece a visitor to the studio notices. “It’s the ultimate ride down the river,” Lance said.  “I want it to look like I just stepped off and I’m ready to explore and go fishing.”

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