February Evening
16 x 20 inches
Edition of 375 with 25 artist’s proofs

Valley of the Madison in Winter
22 x 34 inches
Edition of 375 with 25 artist’s proofs

Along with the print club edition, two other new original lithographs are also in development: Valley of the Madison in Winter, 22 x 34; and February Evening, 16 x 20. All three pieces will be completed and available to view online and in the gallery in early October. Pre-purchased print club lithographs will ship by November 1, 2010.

To place your print club order today, click here , call 406-222-1566, or come in to the gallery during regular business hours, Tuesday through Saturday from 10:00 am – 6:00 pm.

Spring in the Beartooth Mountains
20 x 16 inch lithograph
Edition of 375 with 25 artist’s proofs
Available for a limited time through Chatham Fine Art: $250 unframed, $900 framed

This year we experienced one of the wettest, coldest springs anyone can remember. The endless daily snow and rainfall, while certainly annoying, produced the sort of beautiful phenomenon this new lithograph will represent. Bear in mind that what you are seeing here is the first key plate, which is only a black and white diagram of the elements and cannot possibly convey the atmospheric quality which will be built into the picture over the coming weeks. You can watch the weekly development of this print on this site.

– Russell Chatham

Russell was thrilled with the idea of marrying art and science on the campus and pledged his support. The creation of the Pavilion will add $3 million to the cost of the project. Russell is eager to help in creating this permanent collection. Therefore, he will donate work as needed to fill the space. If you are interested in providing support for the creation of the Russell Chatham Art Pavilion, visit Rocky Mountain College at www.rocky.edu.

Location: Creighton Block Gallery in Virginia City, Mt.

Date: July 17 through August 8, 2010

CATHY ULRICH Of The Gazette Staff – Posted: Thursday, May 6, 2010 10:21 pm

Livingston artist Russell Chatham is the guest of honor at Saturday’s Rocky Mountain College President’s Reception and Dinner.

“The people at Rocky are really good, quality people,” Chatham said. “I’ve been to the campus many times and they really take giving those kids a solid education very seriously. I’m proud to be part of it.”

Rocky Mountain College is in the process of building a new science building. In conjunction with that construction, the campus will be getting a new art pavilion: the Russell Chatham Art Pavilion.

“It’s going to have a permanent collection of art in it,” he said. “I like the fact that it’s not an art gallery per se. You’ve got students and faculty who’ve got other primary interests going to and from laboratories and lecture classes. I like to say we’re laying a friendly ambush for them.”

Chatham specializes in oil painting and lithographs of landscapes.

“But not in the vein that a lot of people might think of it, very picturesque, as it were,” he said. “It’s not confusingly abstract. It’s a style of painting which really grew out of European traditions dating back to the 18th, 19th centuries.”

Chatham, a self-taught artist, cites two influences: his artist grandfather, who was born in Switzerland and educated in Paris and Rome, and his world travels.
“I’ve been around the world 20 times,” he said. “I’ve seen pretty much most of everything there is to see, so my influences are set back in time, if you want to put it that way. I try to create what I call ‘timeless images.’ ”

Part of Chatham’s work consists of lithography, a traditional process that was invented in the early 1800s to create identical prints. With his printer in Livingston, Chatham takes his lithographs to a higher level. Most artists making lithographs stick to three or four colors in their work. Chatham works with 30 to 40.

“We’re the only people in the world doing it this way,” he said. “There’s other people making lithographs, but they’re not printing them on a power press. If you’re printing them strictly by hand, it’s impossible to reach the numbers of colors in each print that we can do.”

While at the dinner, Chatham intends to acknowledge the school for endowing a chair in his name.

“I will be, in effect, a full professor,” he said. “It will probably entail making regular visits to the campus and making myself available to anybody who is interested.”

Chatham will be introduced at the dinner by Donna Forbes, former executive director of the Yellowstone Art Museum and 2010 recipient of the Governor’s Art Award. Forbes has known Chatham since the mid-1980s, when she was the director at the Yellowstone Art Center, which hosted an exhibition of Chatham’s work.

“Being the director of the arts museum for a long time, they evidently felt it was appropriate that I would introduce him,” Forbes said. “I was very flattered because he’s a dear friend and quite the remarkable artist.”

Posted: Friday, April 9, 2010 12:00 am

Rocky Mountain College has received a collection of Russell Chatham artist proof lithographs as a gift from Helori Graff, owner and president of Artcraft Printers.

The Graff gift includes 15 signed and numbered lithographs, with the artist cipher, and is valued at more than $80,000. In addition to lithography, Chatham, who lives in Livingston, also produces original oil paintings, which sell for tens of
thousands of dollars. Despite being a print, Chatham’s lithographs have little to do with modern process lithography, which always starts from a photograph and typically uses only four colors. His art lithographs may have 30 or 40 different layers of color, all of which have to be hand drawn on to the printing plate, and the colors selected for the final effect.

Chatham has been profiled in Esquire, Southwest Art, People, U.S. Art, Antiques and Fine Art, Architectural Digest, Smart, the Denver Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the Seattle Times, the Associated Press, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition and Fresh Air, PBS and CBS Sunday Morning.

Chatham’s writing includes articles, short stories, essays and reviews about fly-fishing, bird hunting and conservation as well as many pieces on food and wine.

Since 1967, his work has appeared in Esquire, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic, Men’s Journal, Outside, Sports Afield, Field & Stream, Outdoor Life, Gray’s Sporting Journal, Fly Fisherman, Fly Rod and Reel, as well as in dozens of newspapers and specialty magazines. His books include “The Angler’s Coast,” “Silent Seasons” and “Dark Waters.” He is the founder and publisher of Clark City Press, which since 1989 has published nearly 40 books of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, art, photography, and children’s classics.