Frontiers’ good guiding and artist friend, Bob White is co-hosting this season’s Artist-in-Residence Program at Bristol Bay Lodge with Eldridge Hardie. The event will take place on June 17 – 24, 2017 and there are four spots remaining. The seven night / six day package is $9,350 per person.
Bob has worked in the outdoor and sporting world since 1984, when he began guiding in Alaska. Since then, Bob has worked as a fly fishing and wingshooting guide, lodge manager, travel consultant and host, illustrator and artist, photographer and author.
For the past seven years, Bob has worked with Bristol Bay Lodge developing an Artist-in-Residence program. The program was developed on the premise that we all live with artwork in our lives, but as much as we value it, few of us have the opportunity to witness its creation, or the chance to discuss the process with the artist. Since 2010, the Artist-in-Residence program has afforded the guests at Bristol Bay Lodge the opportunity to spend time with some of the outdoor world’s premier talent.
Eldridge Hardie
For the sportsman art collector who is deeply enriched by his days in the field or on the water, authenticity of mood and action in a painting are crucial. The quarry, the texture of the landscape, the weather, light, and season, the people and dogs, the boats all are familiar and treasured elements. Eldridge Hardie's own bird hunting and fly fishing pursuits, which have taken him from Canada to the Caribbean, the southernmost tip of South America, Scotland and all across this country, are joined with his artistic ability to make sporting moments live in his pictures.
In a Gray’s Sporting Journal review of the book The Paintings of Eldridge Hardie—Art of a Life in Sport, Christopher Camuto calls the artist “as good as any painter alive in depicting not only the beauty of nature but also the subtle psychological tug in any fishing or hunting scene. Eldridge Hardie gets it,” he says.
Hardie was born on a small ranch near Boerne, Texas in 1940. In 1964 he graduated first in his class with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the School of Fine Art at Washington University in Saint Louis. He has made Denver his home since 1966.
In 2016-2017, the El Paso Museum of Art honored Hardie, a native son of the city, with a retrospective exhibition of his work. He has been the featured artist at the Plantation Wildlife Arts Festival and the Southeastern Wildlife Arts Exposition. The Wildlife Experience Museum presented a one-man retrospective exhibit of Hardie’s work. The National Bird Dog Museum chose Hardie for its first ever one-man retrospective show. He participated in the Prix de West Invitational Art Exhibition and Sale at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum and in the Coors National Western Art Show. The National Museum of Wildlife Art, the Gilcrease Museum, the American Museum of Fly Fishing, and the Artists of America Show have included Hardie's work in invitational exhibits. Also, Sporting Classics magazine honored him with its Award of Excellence for Sporting Art, and the Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame named him a Legendary Artist. He was the inaugural Trout Unlimited Artist of the Year and was named the Atlantic Salmon Federation Artist of the Year. Ducks Unlimited and the National Wild Turkey Federation have commissioned Hardie to produce limited edition prints for their fund-raising art, and five of his designs have been chosen for the Texas Upland Bird, Wild Turkey and Quail Stamps. His work has appeared frequently in Shooting Sportsman, Gray's Sporting Journal, Fly Fishing in Salt Waters, Double Gun Journal, Sporting Classics, and Pointing Dog Journal. His career has been profiled in Wildlife Art News, Western Art & Architecture, Western Art Collector, and Southwest Art. He has illustrated more than twenty-five books, among them, José Ortega y Gasset's classic Meditations on Hunting and Michael McIntosh's Shotguns & Shooting, and he has painted covers for two Roderick Haig-Brown books.
Bubba Wood, owner of Collectors Covey in Dallas, in a recent feature in Western Art & Architecture magazine, cites Eldridge’s passion for sport as the reason for his success. “Eldridge Hardie is the real deal,” says Wood. He explains that it’s easy enough to set up a scene with dogs and quail. Any artist could photograph the scene and then turn around and paint it, but only a real expert in the field would know how to bring in the excitement, the lifted ears of the dogs, and other true elements into the painting. “I know of no sporting artist that has spent more time in the field than El. The authenticity that we sportsmen relate to in his wonderful art reflects those long hours.”
Eldridge Hardie carries on the special heritage of artists Winslow Homer, A. B. Frost, Ogden Pleissner, Frank Benson, and A. Lassell Ripley, who intimately knew outdoor sport.
Eldridge Hardie sums up his long career by saying, “I was born to hunt, fish, and make art about these passions.”
Bob White
Bob White is an artist and author whose work expresses a misspent youth. Instead of doing his homework, his nose was constantly in the outdoor books and sporting magazines of the day. Consequently, he has wandered between Alaska and Patagonia for over two decades as an itinerant fishing guide, looking for gainful employment. He now paints and writes for a living; which is to say, he’s still searching.
Bob has guided in Southwest Alaska and has over three decades of experience there as a fishing and wing shooting guide. He's also guided sportsmen in Argentina and continues to host fly fishing and wing shooting trips to Patagonia, Alaska, Kamchatka and other destinations.
Bob was inducted into the Freshwater Fishing Hall of Fame as a Legendary Artist in 2009. He was Fly Rod & Reel magazine’s Guide of the Year in 1988. As the 1994 Artist of the Year for the Alaska State Parks Foundation, Bob produced and donated the artwork for the first Alaska State Parks Foundation print. He currently illustrates the closing columns for Fly Rod & Reel, Ducks Unlimited. He is a columnist for Fly Rod & Reel and regularly contributes to many other sporting publications.
Bob lives in Marine on St. Croix, Minnesota with his wife, Lisa, their daughter Tommy, and their retriever, Frisbee.
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