THE ANGLER'S PAINTBRUSH
PM: Most of your art features water and marine life. AW: Yeah, it does. You know, I’ve not always done marine life. I started out as a commercial artist drawing everything from aardvarks to zebras. When I first started out I was working for a small screen print company. Customers would come in and want baseball designs or something for the family reunion. I was a jack of all trades for a long time in my career, but I finally got to the point where I was pretty good at drawing fish. The fishing tournament business back in those days was a big thing. They’d order 700,000 shirts for just one event, so they wanted someone who could draw fish fairly well, and they came to me. PM: How do you organize your artwork? AW: When I got to be a teenager I took diving lessons. Once I was old enough to start scuba diving, I really got intrigued with underwater life and seeing how fish actually lived instead of laying on the deck or down at the Fish House dead. I happened to get this underwater camera that I took everywhere with me and took as many pictures as I could, until I ran out of film. Got those processed and realized that I wanted to do more with them than just hang the photos on the wall so I started using them as reference to draw the fish. I started composing actual paintings where I’d put several fish into a painting with a background and a foreground and light source. It just kind of went on from there. PM: You draw a lot of inspiration from what you’ve seen in the wildlife in this area I assume.
18 Pensacola Magazine
AW: Oh yes. I try not to do sand and sea paintings. They’re a dime a dozen and I really can’t do them that well. I tend to stick with what I do best, which is underwater scenes. I really do feel like I’m there when I’m painting an underwater scene. Now, recently, within the last year, I’ve started a series of paintings that are above water. The series is called “No Jumping.” It’s a series of paintings that reflect back to when I was a kid, we used to jump off things, I told you about the pier we used to jump off. We jumped off that pier, we jumped off the Bob Sikes Bridge. I try to do more than just fish. Fishing, the charter boat industry and the diving industry have got me to where I am now, but I want to do more than that. Now that I’m getting older I want to go back to my youth and paint those things that I’m probably never going to be around again. The days of jumping off the pier are gone. The days of jumping off the Bob Sikes Bridge are gone. But, they will carry on in paintings that I’ll give to my kids and they’ll be able to give to their kids the story about how grandpa was stupid enough to jump off the pier. PM: What was the first big project you worked on? AW: It wasn’t a big project, but it was the most exciting project for me because I thought I’d made the big time. I worked for the city of Pensacola for several years. I quit and went to Florida State in the Studio Art program. When I came back for Christmas break that year, 1979, I got a call from Jack Tuttle, who was a City Clerk for the city of Pensacola. He asked me to do a rendering of city hall. At the time they were considering converting city hall
to the T.T. Wentworth Museum. He knew I knew the building and he knew I was an artist so he gave me that project, which I did over Christmas break. I did in pencil because it had to be done quickly, turned it in to him, and I think they paid me $100. That was big money to me at the time. I remember I went out and bought a Bose sound system with it for my dorm room. Anyway, when I got back from Christmas break to Florida State I got a letter in the mail from my mom. It was an editorial in the Pensacola News Journal about how they wanted to convert city hall to the T.T. Wentworth Museum, and it included my drawing. I was so excited about that. I showed everybody at college that I had made the big time, I was basically published. I had some artwork that they had paid for, which meant I was a professional artist, and it got published. PM: It’s funny thinking about how your first exciting project was a sketching of city hall and now you’re the mainstay for these big, bright fishing artworks. It’s interesting to see that transition. AW: You know that transition happened I think back in the 90s. Like I told you before, I was doing everything; you had to draw everything and be a jack of all trades. I was able to specialize in fish, which I really loved, and I think that’s the reason I was really good at it. I had actual reference material whereas the normal artist had to use photographs from a magazine or a dead fish at weigh-in hanging up on a hook, because there was no Internet back then. I was actually able to get in the water and watch fish swim. My friends would catch fish,