Sporting Classics
Volume XXV, Issue 1
(January/February 2006)
Fishing
For Men, For Inspiration, For Art
Leather fish — painstakingly cut, stitched, hand-scribed and dyed — represent the ultimate artform for Lance Boen
By Jameson Parker
pp 116-121
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The initial impression is of monumental scale. The young man is six feet, seven inches. The ceilings of his studio soar fourteen feet into the air, yet the beams that support the structure are so huge that even in that large and sunny space they manage to look massive. Even the doors are ten feet tall. Then there is the art.
A largemouth bass three feet long. A rainbow trout five feet long. A ten-foot steelhead wearing a saddle. Apart from the intentional homage to the saddle-maker’s craft and skill, if you ever caught a ten-foot steelhead, you’d probably need a saddle.
Lance Boen (pronounced as if it had a “W” in the middle) may be tall and his sculptures bigger than life, but the man is quietly humble about his work. A devout Christian, he attributes his astounding success to God.
His success would be astounding if you considered only the acclaim he has received for his leather fish sculptures at the very young age (artistically speaking) of 33, but even more astounding is the success he achieved in the world of fine arts while he was still a student.
As and undergraduate, his paintings - in watercolors, oils and acrylics - were good enough to earn him a one-year position as the art assistant at the University of La Verne. Later, in graduate school at Claremont Graduate University, he had a solo exhibition at California State University’s Robert V. Fullerton Art Museum that garnered praise from art critics. To put this in perspective, art students, even graduate art students, simply don’t get solo exhibition in the rarefied and snooty air of the fine arts world, let alone critically acclaimed solo exhibitions. It just doesn’t happen.
But it did for Lance Boen. Strangely enough, while he takes a very mild and modest pride in the acclaim his early work received, the work itself he now dismisses as “dark,” reflective of the influence of his pre-Christian life in Los Angeles. Only when pressed does he reluctantly acknowledge the role that early work played in his own growth and evolution as an artist.
“Much of what I do with fish sculpture comes from a fine art background, conceptual pieces that had nothing to do with fish,” he explains. The distinction is a delicate one. The implication is that representative or figurative art (portrayals of recognizable things: people, animals, landscapes, sculptures of fish) is somehow inferior to purely intellectual abstractions, as if one artist’s interpretation of an organic thing is somehow less important, less valid, less relevant, than another artist’s interpretation of an intellectual concept or an emotional state, a social or religious condition.
Boen, the fine arts prodigy, argued in favor of the superiority of intellectual abstractions until Boen, the self-deprecating sculptor of fish, interrupted himself to say mildly, “Of course, Monet’s landscapes are as transcendent as any work of art that’s ever been created.” And then he had the good grace to laugh at himself.
“But to make a career in fine arts, you have to live in L.A., away from nature,” he says. “I started the fish sculptures in part to empower me to get back to nature. I liked the fishing community more than I do the fine arts community.”
Nature, for Lance Boen, had its roots at his parent’s place in Mt. Baldy, 4,000 feet up in the San Gabriel Mountains of southern California, and at his grandfather’s cabin on the eastern slope of the Sierras. His father and grandfather introduced him to fly fishing, and today his late grandfather’s wicker creel holds a place of honor in an office cluttered with old rods and older reels, and antique duck decoy, lures, flied tied by friends and patrons, a Russian knife, two holsters in the shape of the bottom half of a trout (made for his single-action revolvers), an old hay-hook, his Bible, photographs of his wife and young children, and a painting done when he was only seventeen of a rainbow trout powered by a 426 HEMI motor. “I was really into engines then, muscle cars with big-block engines.”
He was also in an extraordinary junior high school then, where his teachers encouraged his goal of being an artist as much as his parents did. “There was a former teacher who opened her ranch to the students, so every Friday we’d go there and learn how to do everything from growing vegetables to creating the bowls we used to eat the food we’d grown. The school would bring these incredible artisans up from the city and they’d teach us how to make things. We even forged the knives we used to carve a twenty-foot totem for a ranch instillation. I learned how to do things with my hands,” he recalls.
Boen may have trained his hands to do specific things, but clearly the skill was there from the get-go. He started tying his own flies when he was twelve and caught a thirteen-inch rainbow with the very first fly he ever tied. (He carried the trout home in a bucket and released it in the spring-pond behind the house, where it lived for several years and where he studied its habits.) In seventh grade he fashioned a fishing rod out of a paper clip, a hook out of a staple, and tied a fly small enough to catch the class goldfish. And even at that age, the hands that tied flies were already painting.
Although he had decided to become an artist while he was still a sophomore in high school, like any boy he was distracted by other things - muscle cars, for instance - and particularly by basketball and volleyball, both of which he excelled at, until a professor at the University of LaVerne got him to give up sports to concentrate on art. “But it was grad school that was a complete indulgence for me. There were fifty other artists there and for two years I did nothing but art. I don’t think I even slept for those two years. I just kept producing art, like a tree dropping fruit. I was always getting new ideas, trying new applications. I’d push the sculptures so far, and if something didn’t work, I could use it in another piece.”
A few of those early pieces reflect an interest in cars or motorcycles, but most have an organic quality that makes the step to fish sculptures less dramatic than it might otherwise seem. It was a step that evolved partly from a desire to be out of the city and closer to nature, and partly from a twelve –inch trout he created out of leather as a gift for a friend. Very simple, very primitive, that first life-sized trout started him on a new path.
Today that path continues in his large studio in the Carmel Valley, a few minutes walk from the Carmel River, where he fishes for steelhead and inspiration. It is a path that involves constant experimentation and constant growth, using a range of tools from the simple - the finger of an old glove that was just lying around - to the incredibly sophisticated - an industrial sewing machine that costs as much as a small car.
The leather he uses is the same leather that the great custom saddle makers use. “I could try – a different medium, but leather has the ability to pick up very sensitive detail. And there’s something very tactile about leather that makes you want to touch it, like a saddle or a baseball glove.”
Each sculpture starts with a paper template (the templates are beautiful enough to hang on the wall themselves), but don’t think this means he creates duplicates the way painters will run a series of prints from an oil original. Each of Boen’s fish sculptures is an original work-of-art.
“Most artists today don’t have the time to make one-of-a-kind pieces. I want to create the art I want, and always do my best work. I’m lucky enough to have patrons willing to buy originals.”
The leather is cut and stitched to match the template, a monumental task that takes all his considerable size and strength. (When he created the ten-foot steelhead, it took three other people to help hold the leather as he stitched.) Then he spends anywhere from a few weeks to many months building up layers of detail, oil-dye pigmentation, tooling, subtly exaggerating certain elements – scales on this piece, a dorsal fin on that piece – to heighten the beauty of his creations, emphasizing the qualities that thrill the angler.
Leather is an unforgiving medium, and a drop of oil-dye in the wrong place could be disastrous, but Boen combines the artist’s obsessive-compulsive desire for perfection with the student’s eagerness to learn.
“I made a mistake on a commissioned piece recently when I dripped some pigment in the wrong place. When I tried to correct it, building up layers of pigmentation to create a new base to work on, I discovered a whole new technique. And sometimes I like the imperfection of hand-scribing, and I’ll do that instead of tooling.
Illustrating his method of building up layers of pigmentation, he casually took a tarpon he was creating for a patron – he typically works on four or five projects simultaneously – and started applying oil-dyes to the back. “I always finish the backs. No one may ever see them, but I like to do it.” A typical statement from an artist whose attention to detail on his sculptures is truly staggering, involving painstaking hand-tooling – or sometimes hand-scribing – every single scale on a sixty-inch tarpon or a ten-foot steelhead.
The famous minimalist Anne Truitt once tried to explain her sculpture by saying it was an effort to make something outside that matched what she felt inside. When asked what Christianity has brought to his life, Boen answers instantly, without hesitation or consideration. “Joy.” His fish reflect that.
Captions
p. 119 – Only 33, Lance Boen hand-scribes one of his unique leather creations at his studio in Carmel Valley, California. Above: Details of a silver and king salmon, each 36 inches long. Opposite: Details of steelhead and tiger fish, each 36 inches. Preceding pages: Sixty-inch grouper.
p. 120 – From left: The artist’s beautiful interpretation of a king salmon and brown trout. Below: Three people were needed to hold the leather as the artist stitched together this ten-foot steelhead, complete with a full-size western saddle.
p. 121 – Boen fashioned this 36-inch peacock bass and 84-inch striped marlin from the same heavy leather used by saddle makers. Each of his fish sculptures reflects astonishing attention-to-detail and a design that is both artful and eye-catching.