Ben Miller:  Fishing for a Masterpiece

by Henry Adams

When Jackson Pollock first exhibited his paintings, they sent out a palpable energy quite different from a traditional Renaissance painting.  Viewers were blown into another zone of consciousness.  We get this same feeling from Ben Miller’s work, which transfers our usual ideas about representation into a something different—a form of awareness that’s strangely abstract, mystical, and even a bit religious. 

In Ben Miller’s case, this is very much the product of the way he brings together two art forms that seemingly stand far apart:  fly-fishing and painting.  We tend to think of fly fishing as a sport, as a physical activity, although in fact, it has a mystical, shamanistic quality as well—and in fact this seems to be the thing that fishermen most prize even more than catching fish.  It’s an art form.  

We tend to think of painting as a cerebral activity, and to forget that it’s also very physical, and that producing a sweeping, decisive brushstroke takes the same sort of mysterious athletic intelligence as to perfectly cast a fishing line, or to throw a baseball.  

Ben Miller was born in Everett, Washington, and started fishing very early, just about the time that he first learned to walk.  His family lived in the country.  His father was a logger who worked in crews with a very specific role.  Their task was to cut the limbs off the trees, which had just been felled by a different crew; to cut the trunks into regular lengths; and then to attach chokers to these logs so that they could pulled to one location and stacked into piles.  During the winter, snow and ice made it too dangerous to do this work, so his dad would be laid off for several months, and would fill up the time by doing steel-head fishing as if it were a regular job.  At night his dad would tie up hooks; and during the day he and a buddy would fish all winter long.  There’s a lot to consider when you’re fishing:  your choice of the leaders, the weight of the line, the weight and flexibility of the rod—and you want a fly that matches with the sort of fish you’re trying to catch.  Ben started learning about these things in early childhood.  It’s not that different from learning how to paint.

For some reason, in high school, art was the class that Ben was really drawn to.  He always felt that he had a knack for coming up with a creative approach.  In college he didn’t know what it was that he wanted to do, so he actually took a class on how to figure this out and ended up deciding to become an artist.  After getting an art degree, he then taught high school for twelve years.  Many of his paintings were renderings of fish in water, and explored what it would be like to exist in an underwater world.  Traditional in technique they were a bit strange in their world outlook.  While doing these, he came up with the idea of trying to paint with a fly rod.  To transform the process of painting by making it more like fishing.  And when the idea hit he knew it was what he wanted to do with his life.  He quit his job and moved to Montana where some of the best American trout streams are located and moved into a tiny shack with a wood-burning stove.  In winter it was so cold that you could see your breath.  

Fly casting takes a very particular kind of athletic skill.  The goal is to learn to cast with accuracy to a particular spot, at a distance of about twenty feet, and to do this in a way so that the hook and fly float down gently as if they were an actual bug or mosquito landing on the water.  Generally speaking, you don’t want to throw your arm back too far, as if you were throwing a baseball, since then the line can get entangled in branches and other snags.  Instead, the rod should stand surprisingly close to vertical, and the trick is not to use all your strength but to learn to concentrate the force into a single flick of the wrist.  The trick is to concentrate your energy in the fashion of a karate chop breaking a brick.  

In some regards the process is highly repetitive, since a perfect cast entails making essentially the same motion over and over again.  But in other regards it’s a process of continuous search.  A great fly caster is not casting repetitively to the same spot, but searching out the areas where trout might be lurking.  And the goal is to make every cast mimic the flight of whatever bug or mosquito a trout is most attuned to, most eager to devour, at that moment of the day and in that season.  

Athletic activities such as this have a paradoxical aspect.  You need to think about what you’re doing, but to do it well you need to learn not to think, but to enter a strange, essentially mystical zone of mind where you lose awareness of yourself and your surroundings and everything blends together.  Time vanishes and at the same time you’re intensely engaged and absorbed at every moment.  Since you’re not thinking you don’t know exactly how, but somehow, if you’re fortunte, you enter a state of mind where you can do things perfectly, and in perfect harmony with one’s surroundings. 

For Ben the idea of painting with a fly rod came before he knew what he wanted to paint.  But as he reflected it became clear that his subject should be the river.  A river is different every day.  One day it’s a trickle; another a raging torrent.  It changes according to the weather and the light.  It often sparkles with glittering light.  It’s at once something very immediate and real and something hard to grasp because of its constant changes.  The river you see at one moment is quite literally a different thing a few moments later, composed of different molecules, composed of different substance, although it may well look pretty much the same.  You can’t look at it, can’t fix it in your mind, without losing yourself in how it manifests abstract principles of mechanics and flow, of how it manifests an idea.  

And a river has curious affinities with abstract painting.  When you’re standing in front of an abstract painting it’s a physical thing but it’s hard to take in as one.  It’s more like an idea or a concept.  To see it you need to lose yourself in the gestures, emotions and processes by which it was made.  You need to grasp the spiritual and cosmic forces that went into what you’re looking at.  As the Greek philosopher Heraclitus observed more than 2,000 years ago:  “No man ever steps in the same river twice. For it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”

It took some careful thinking to figure out how to turn a fly rod into a paintbrush, but in many ways this was not unlike what you do when you go fishing.  Before he goes fishing a fisherman needs to dive into his fly box and decide what flies he’s going to use:  what size and color they should be, what sort of thread, what sort of feathers.  The basic idea was to use sponges of different sizes instead of a hook.  He now has about thirty different types of sponges, each of which makes a distinctly different kind of mark.  In some ways the process is not unlike making a pointillist paintings, like those of Seurat, since it requires careful thinking about size and color before making a mark.  As with fly fishing, you’re making a lot of decisions before you even get around to making the cast.  

A lot of mistakes went into developing a system that works, for its one thing to paint indoors, and quite another to paint outside in cold weather and blustering wind.  At first Ben tried setting up a canvas on an easel, but the painting acted like a sail and the easel would often blow over.  To make an easel that was more secure, Ben got a piece of plywood, cut it in half, and put hinges on it.  When he set this up, it would buck the wind up to about 25 miles per hour.  Unfortunately, when it was very cold the paint would freeze when it hit the canvas, so he decided to put a heater underneath the plywood support.  And unfortunately, the heater worked too well:  the plywood caught on fire.  So to prevent this from happening, with the help of a metal shop, Ben fabricated an aluminum easel with a hinged support.  When you heat this it doesn’t catch fire.  But since canvas didn’t hold up well to repeated hits with the sponge he shifted to high-impact Plexiglas; and when it turned out that his paint wouldn’t bond cleanly to a Plexiglas surface he moved on to acrylic.

The essence of the process is that Ben works outdoors, and is totally physically engaged with the rivers he paints—some of the greatest trout streams in America.  For the most part he produces his paintings in a single session of about four or five hours of grueling work.  If he came back the next day, the light would be different, the weather would be different, and he’d have to start over.  While his paintings often look “abstract,” it’s important to realize that they’re also representational, since every splash of color corresponds to something he actually sees.  And as you look at them it’s as if a river or stream comes alive before your eyes, with the rushing water, the glints of light on the surface, and the rocks, gravel and sand and waterlogged leaves and twigs on the river bottom.  

Interestingly, when he’s finished applying paint, he turns the painting around so that you see the marks of color in the order he made them.  Generally speaking what comes first is the light shimmering on the water; then the streaks of the water itself; and finally the streambed.  

When you first see Ben’s paintings, they look “abstract,” but as you enter into them they can, as it were, come alive and become powerfully realistic.  And it’s interesting to note that the Impressionist paintings of Claude Monet had this quality also.  When 19th-century viewers first saw such Impressionist paintings they thought they were nonsensical, and would make as much sense hung upside down as right-side up.  But as we’ve become accustomed to them, learned to see them, and also become more familiar with the “abstract” quality of camera snapshots, they envelop us more completely, they seem more “realistic,” than academic studio paintings, which put beside the work of the impressionists often seems contrived, unconvincing and lifeless.  

A painter can connect with nature in different ways.  A Renaissance painter represented nature, but to do this also entails a process of “becoming” nature—of becoming one with cosmic energy and the life force, and of becoming a tree, becoming a wave, becoming the sky, as you move from one to another passage of a landscape.  For a painter like Jackson Pollock this process of identification with the forces of nature became all-consuming. As he famously boasted, he was not representing nature but rather “I am nature.”  Indeed, painting became a form of religious ritual, not unlike the ancient process of Shamanism.  Shamanism, which is a world-wide phenomenon, but has been particularly well-recorded in Asia, involves a figure who is at once prophet, priest and healer, who enters into a trance-like state in order to deliver prophecies, to experience religious visions, and to heal the sick.  It’s sometimes associated with psychedelic drugs; and it’s also often associated with spinning, or dancing, or with strange convulsions.  

Notably, for Jackson Pollock the process of making a painting had a dance-like aspect, and also entailed a sort of loss of normal consciousness, to become as one with centrifugal force and the forces of gravity, and the way they exert their energy on spatterings of paint, as they fly through the air or pool and dribble on the canvas.  

Interestingly, fishing also has a mystical aspect, and this is the central theme of the first great classic of fishing literature, The Perfect Angler by Isaac Walton, who was a student and follower of the priest and metaphysical poet John Donne.  Indeed, it’s been suggested that the title of the book is a play on the phrase “The perfect Anglican.”  Two themes run through the book:  the notion that fishing provides release from the stresses of life because it brings the fisherman into contact with the pastoral beauty and healing powers of nature; and the notion that fishing has a contemplative aspect, and involves entering a state similar to that of religious devotion or prayer.  As already mentioned, this is surely one of the major reasons for the popularity of fly-fishing—something that every fly fisherman discovers at some point on his own.  As Benton Miller has remarked:  “You’re in this daze where everything just melts away.  You’re focused on the line.  It’s pretty much a form of meditation.”

Connecting with nature is a big part of this religious feeling.  Trout are particular as to where they can thrive and survive.  They like a rushing stream, and to stay alive they need quite cold water, because it contains more of the oxygen they need to stay alive.  To get to where the trout fishing is best is in itself something of an adventure.  You need to venture deep into the last unspoiled wilderness areas of the United States, particularly in Montana but also in Idaho, Oregon and Washington:  to rivers with colorful names like the Stillaguamish, the Frying Pan, the Nesowadnebunk, the South Fork Flathead, and the Big Two-Hearted River of Hemingway’s story.   You need to dress warmly, though cold fingers are part of the experience, since you can’t sensitively handle fishing line with gloves; you often need to wade out into the ice cold stream to reach the best location for casting; and it’s not unusual to be sharing your enjoyment of the landscape with hawks, raccoons, beavers and even grizzly bears.  To be a true trout fisherman often entails leaving the civilized world behind, and entering into the sort of fierce engagement with nature that humankind enjoyed thousands of years ago.  Not surprisingly, a major aspect of what might be terms the “religion” of fly-casting is a commitment to conservation, the belief that we need to protect the endangered rivers on our fragile planet.  

Human-kind is one of the most recent of human species.  It probably emerged as a distinct species about 100,000 years ago, and the first clear indication of our uniquely human brain-qualities emerged about 50,000 years ago or less, when humankind began making tools and producing paintings on caves.  Presumably this coincided with something that doesn’t leave a physical trace:  the development of human language.  What’s peculiar about human-kind is something strangely akin to being crazy:  the ability to imagine things that haven’t happened, and may never happen, and to see things that aren’t there.  Take a dog or a pony into a cave and they will see just rocks.  Take a human being and they will see faces and figures and strange creature, and may even feel impelled to take charcoal or paint to outline and fill in this curious figment of their imagination.  

On the face of it, making art would seem like a useless pastime.  Why when you’re living in a cold, harsh, unfriendly environment, should you both to go as much as two miles underground to make a painting on the wall of a cave? But curiously, it’s the instant when art emerged that marks the  moment when humankind went from an endangered species, less numerous than mountain gorillas are today, to a species which has spread over and dominated every corner of our planet.  

Trying to explain why Ben Miller’s painting are significant is a bit like trying to explain why cave paintings marked a critical shift in the nature of human consciousness.  But surely the essence of art—perhaps particularly of great art—is that it allows out mind to drift and to cross traditional boundaries, and in some curious way this process makes us more resourceful in facing the place where we stand, the specific moment where we are.  And interestingly, this creative process seems to entail some sort of shift back and forth between conscious thought and the state of mind known a reverie, where we lose track of who and where we are and enter a different zone.  We become better at catching fish when we slip in and out of this mysterious zone; we become better at both making and understanding works of art.  

Ben Miller’s art encourages us to dissolve the traditional boundary between a “physical” activity like trout-fishing, and a “mental” or “artistic” activity like painting and to recognize that at their deepest level they’re rather similar.  And he reminds us that both trout-fishing and art have a function that’s both practical and mystical.  Engaging with them teaches us to become better at actually getting things done.  They also bring us into a strange mystical, shamanistic zone that brings us closer to nature, to a feeling of harmony with our own selves, and to a deep connection and understanding of the universe as a whole.