AoR 158: Frank Stick, Splendid Painter of the Out-of-Doors, by biographer Mike Mordell

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>> Welcome to The Art of Range, a podcast focused on rangelands and the people who manage them. I'm your host, Tip Hudson, range and livestock specialist with Washington State University Extension. The goal of this podcast is education and conservation through conversation. Find us online at artofrange.com.

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Welcome back to The Art of Range. My guest today is Mike Mordell, a forest products businessman who's been in that industry for 40 years and is also an art collector. This podcast is called The Art of Range based on the classic conception of an art as the application of a body of knowledge. We say that one practices medicine or practices law, and ecology is a complex domain of knowledge that requires place-based practice to become competent, just like medicine or law. But we've only talked a few times about artwork of visual arts that depict the natural world in all its beauty and complexity. Some of the most iconic scenes in American historical art come from the first half of the 20th century. And many people who don't know much about art could probably name some of the painters from that period of time. Frank Stick is one of those painters who might not be as well-known as he ought to be. And to that end, Mike Mordell wrote a book about the painter Frank Stick a few years ago. And we're here to talk about that author. He painted outdoor scenes during a very interesting time in American history. And this is a very, very interesting book for someone who doesn't know much about art but appreciates it. Mike, welcome.

>> Thank you very much, Tip. It's a pleasure to be here.

>> When did Frank Stick live and what kind of scenes would he be known for?

>> So Frank Stick was born in the late 1800s in the Dakotas before it was North and South Dakota, and he was born in Huron. He started his career back at the turn of the last century. So he was a very talented young man and, at a bright and early age, was accepted into the Chicago Institute of Arts in their art school. And then from there he went off to Brandywine, which was led by a very famous illustrator by the name of Howard Pyle. And Howard Pyle taught Philip Goodwin, N.C. Wyeth. I mean, there's a whole list of people that he is responsible for influencing. And that was his peer group back in that time. And he had one of the most interesting careers of any individual, let alone artist, that I've ever run across, and he died in 1966.

>> That was a really fascinating period of time in American history. In relatively rapid succession, we had the Civil War. We had the rise of the Industrial Revolution, major, major changes in American industry, building trades, agriculture, cultural shifts. We had railroad monopolies. We had many depressions that kind of came and went, a boom and bust cycle that lasted through the 1800s. We've talked about on this podcast before the fact that many of the factors that led to the big cattle booms that we associate with much of the environmental degradation from that period were largely a result of economic factors and not so much people that didn't know what they were doing in regards to grazing, but a really tumultuous time. And, of course, in the middle of all that, two world wars, which were also shaped by the Industrial Revolution, the first world war that we called the war to end all wars because it had such horrific loss of human life because we now had machines against man, and we hadn't adapted to that yet. And, of course, some significant exploitation in the natural world with the near extermination of the bison, with the near extermination of beavers in much of the Great Basin and part of the West. Well, these painters of that era, how was their work usually paid for and viewed by the public? Like, what were they writing?

>> So it wasn't so much the public. So think about the timeframe that a lot of this -- This is sporting art was his genre. So it was a lot of hunting and fishing art. So when you think about the times from about the late 1800s all the way up to the 1940s, no television, really radio. The one advertising medium that was out there was calendars. And every hardware store had calendars in there with their logo on there. The biggest calendar company in the United States was a calendar company called the Thomas D. Murphy Calendar Company in Ohio. And they were an entire city block, just to give you an idea. And so, these artists, Philip Goodwin, Frank Stick, W.H.D. Korner, I mean, and not -- I understand all the people listening to this might not know who some of those individuals are. I'd encourage you to take a look in their contemporaries on your search engine or, you know, ChatGPT or whatever you use and see how influential they were back then. So people knew their art. It's on here. And then when you look at the effect that it had -- So again, you got to think about the population difference. What did people do back there? Well, I can tell you. Up through the 50s, probably 80% of the population of the United States hunted and fished. And that's why the majority, I should say a good chunk, of that art was always related to those scenes because the average person related to it because they did it every day, whether it was subsistence, recreation, what have you. But their living came from the calendar company. So in Frank Stick's case, he had commissions from them. He would have to produce x amount of paintings that they would use in their calendars. And one that we own, he did in 1927, that was on calendars for almost 30 years. They were still using it, so, And it's really interesting because some of the art now is quite valuable. Back then, they pretty much reproduced the image for the calendar. Sometimes they might have sold the painting to an employee or somebody else, but a lot of them just got destroyed and thrown in the dumpster because they were done with them. And I wish I could go back in that time and drag all those out of the dumpster. I'd be very wealthy. But that's how they got paid for the most part. And they did do some commissions from -- In most cases, they'd be fairly well-off individuals, industrialists, et cetera, that wanted a canvas of them, reeling in a marlin on their boat or what have you. So, you know, they still had to make a living. So however you had to do it, they did.

>> Yeah, that's really interesting. It challenges my ideas about how I think art gets done, at least today. I think of people writing because of inspiration or because they're captivated by, you know, some natural scene. But these guys were painting almost like a magazine writer would have to write. Like, if there's a magazine coming out, whatever, monthly, quarterly, you're going to have to write whether you feel inspired by a topic or not. Like, you've got to pump it out.

>> Or in a lot of cases, the publisher might say, look, I need four hunting scenes and six fishing scenes, and so you had an [inaudible] that you had to work off of. So ironically or coincidentally with that, it leads to a really good point that you just made. So Frank Stick was a very, in his particular case, as well as a lot of these other artists, so they were always labeled as, including N.C. Wyeth, whose paintings command hundreds of thousands of dollars today, illustrators. They were labeled as illustrators. So from a lot of the general art community, they were kind of looked down upon. Like, you're just an illustrator. You're really not an artist because you're just churning things out. And a lot of those people that weren't churning things out have gone by the wayside. And a lot of this illustrative art that, again, morphed into more, I don't want to call it easel art, but it wasn't for anybody other than themselves. Frank Stick, I have a letter that's a really poignant letter. It's a key letter in Frank Stick's life. So he was really good friends with Zane Grey. And so, Zane Gray, again, for your podcasters that are maybe younger than 40, he was a really famous Western writer, probably one of the most famous people in the world when he was producing books. And he and Frank Stick were buddies. They helped found the -- They were two of the people that got the Izaak Walton League off the ground, quite frankly, as well as Frank Stick's got a long list of accomplishments. But he wrote a letter to Zane Grey in 1927 that I own saying, you know, hey, they had some things they had to work out for the founding of the Izaak Walton League. But the most interesting paragraph to me was right near the end. He said, I'm getting tired of having to paint for pay and not paint what I want. And after that letter, he didn't paint. And it wasn't because of that letter, but I don't have any canvases that I can document after about 1927, '28. And he didn't do another painting that I can see until 1944, and that is in the Outer Banks History Museum in North Carolina. He didn't do it for sale, he did it for him. And I own several of his paintings that he did for friends and family, but he never sold another painting commercially.

>> Wow.

>> And then he got involved in a lot of other things. So his life, just in a nutshell, without him, Virgin Islands National Park wouldn't exist. Without him, Outer Banks, you know, seashores and all the protected --

>> Of North Carolina.

>> -- would not exist.

>> Yeah.

>> He was a really good individual at making a lot of money and then giving it all away and then starting it all over again, and just a conservationist at heart. And he's also probably -- He's considered the Audubon of fish. He documented and discovered several new species. There's a book called The Artist's Catch that his son did on his dad posthumously that shows all of his pictures on. He used to wait by the docks until the fish came in, so the colors were still bright, and then paint them. And they're just spectacular. So really an ardent conservationist. And artists as a whole when it relates to range, our natural resources, have an absolutely profound and tremendous effect on everything. So one classic example is you think about Yellowstone National Park. You think about Yosemite. All of those parks, a lot of them exist because of artists. So back then, especially Yosemite. You know, you had Thomas Moran, again, paintings that go into the millions, Albert Bierstadt, paintings that go into the millions. They're dramatized paintings that they did of those areas when they were under consideration. There were developers, preservationists. They were the preservationists. And it was their canvas that swayed the people back east that had never seen them to preserve the areas.

>> Wow. That reminds me of a quote that I've often used regarding music. There was a musician in reportedly ancient Athens who said, let me write the songs of a nation, and I don't care who writes its laws because we live toward, move toward those things that we value. And visual arts have that kind of effect of shaping, you know, what we think we love and what we value. And I was not aware that that kind of art was so instrumental in setting many of our national parks.

>> Well, our national parks and just the West as a whole. So when you think about right after Lewis and Clark, the railroads then sent people West. And there was a fellow by the name of Stanley who did a lot of the plates. Nobody had ever seen any of this stuff before. So when they were sending images back, the public was -- There is no way. There's animals that look like that, an antelope. There's no way that scenery looks like that. And when they found out that it did, then that kind of opened up one of the factors for opening up the West. And hey, you can homestead and have free land and all these other things. But it was that, my gosh, we got to check this out, and this is fascinating, and I can make a living there, so.

>> A while back, I interviewed a man that I know very well in Ellensburg who, at the time, had just turned 100. He's now 101. But he grew up in southeastern Montana. And his parents came to Montana because of these brochures that were being distributed by the railroad companies that showed photographs from Western Montana, where everything was green. And, of course, the Homestead Act was still in effect. And so, once they got to Montana, they discovered that none of the good stuff was left. And they were in Caliche Flats in sagebrush country where sometimes it didn't rain for a few years, and it was pretty rough going, but they were drawn there. I mean, this was compelling enough to cause them to leave whatever life they had and to just make a run for it and see what could happen in the West.

>> Images are powerful, and they evoke emotions and opportunity. And the artists, somebody has to put that down on paper. If it's not done right, it doesn't have the same effect on you. Me and you drawing a stick figure saying, hey, you need to go to Oregon isn't going to have the same effect as Albert Bierstadt doing a spectacular landscape. So artists convey, and a lot of their paintings were sensationalized. So when you look at them from a historical record, they'd put in a mountain over here if it added to the scene. And, you know, technically it was correct, but they took a lot of liberties because they could and no one else had ever seen it. But, you know, it's creative liberties on artists' part. But it did, to your point, drag and compel a lot of people to come West. And especially the railroads later on. I mean, they wanted people on their trains. So they put these destinations to sell tickets to go to Glacier National Park, you know, which was, you know, Burlington Northern and all these other places that, hey, if I can get people on our trains, we make money, and we need proper posters to do that.

>> Well, and the steam trains could carry fuel for quite a while, but they couldn't carry water for that far. So they were trying to set up a town. The railroad companies evidently were trying to set up cities with people in them about every 10 miles to make a rail stop so that someone would be there to manage the water and they could fill the trains back up again. At what point did you become interested in art, and then what brought Frank Stick to your attention?

>> Really good questions on both. You know, everybody always has some type of event that inspires them in whatever passion that they have. For me, I've always liked art. I can remember as a kid -- And sometimes things hit people, and other ones, there might be 20 kids on a field trip, and 19 think they're in a place, like, what the heck are we doing here, I can't wait to get home. And there's that one kid that's going this is the coolest thing I've ever seen in my life. And for me, I was in probably sixth grade. We went to the Detroit Institute of Arts. I grew up in Detroit. And I remember it like it was yesterday, going in there. And Van Dyck's Blue Boy is part of their collection. Very famous painting. If you look it up, everybody's seen it. Trust me, you might not know the name, but you've seen it. And I remember staring at that going, wow, and the little boy looking back, and it hit. And so, ever since that time, when I had opportunities, I would either take an elective class when I got into high school. In college, I took a lot of art classes. I just really got into art, and not just paintings. It could be architecture, could be this, could be that. For Frank Stick, it was I put myself through school logging in Montana. So probably in the summer of '78, I was dating a woman that was -- You know, she lived in Missoula. We used to go up to Glacier. First time we went to Glacier, we went to Lake McDonald Lodge. And there are three Frank Sticks in that lodge. They're still there today. And I remember looking at them going, wow, those are great scenes. And fast-forward now. So that's the 70s. I'm a college student. I have no money, and they weren't for sale. They're park property. So fast-forward to about the late 80s, early 90s, and I bought my first Frank Stick from a friend of mine that's an art dealer. He knew I liked him. Not a lot of people knew who he was at that time. No books about him or anything else. And he said I've got a Frank Stick. It turns out to be probably one of his earliest canvases looking at the signature on it. But I bought that, and that started the whole thing. And from there, it's just been a relentless march to go ahead. And, you know, we probably own -- And we've sold some, you know, because we feel we're Frank Stick's caretaker. People that collect that type of art know who he is today, for sure. And the book brought him back to the forefront back in 2004. But I've sold some really good paintings, not for the money, just because I felt that good paintings needed to turn up at auction every once in a while because, you know, there's a lot of mediocre work that turns up for all artists. And then there's a handful of, whoa, that's got to be that artist's best work. And so, I have sold a few of those at different times, and it generates a lot of buzz. And last year, I put the cover of my book for sale in the Coeur d'Alene auction, and it set the world record for Frank Stick, which, again, just for me, it's about him. And when people have questions about Frank Stick, auction houses, whatever it is, they call me because they know I know everything.

>> Yeah. Yeah, There were quite a few painters from that era. Why was he not as well-known as some of the others?

>> You know, that's a really good, another good question.

>> Because the art really is spectacular.

>> It is. And, you know, some of it is not as good. But the stuff that's good is as good as anybody's. So part of it's just being at the right place at the right time and who you know. So here's a perfect case in point. An artist by the name of Philip Goodwin. So Philip Goodwin, you've seen his work, probably didn't know it was his. And, again, for your listeners, look it up. He happened to be kind of a prodigy of Charlie Russell, C.M. Russell. Pretty good company. And he's a really talented guy. I tell you, overall, you know, Frank Stick's a fabulous, fantastic painter. Philip Goodwin, not light years ahead. He's better with faces and other things, but he's just fantastic. And so, because of his association with Russell, who everybody knows, everybody still knows today, his work has continued to people who are aware of him. And it's about awareness. You think about how many artists are out today. There's literally tens of thousands of people trying to make a living painting or etching or whatever it is. And there's just a rarefied small percentage of them that can actually make a living at it. And some of them, they're like musicians. They could be the best guitarists in the world. But if you don't hook up with ACDC, you might not get discovered the same way. It's the same with this, so.

>> Yeah. I think you mentioned last time we talked that art collectors can keep an artist's name alive by buying and selling his stuff. So even if you like a painting, you might choose to sell it just because it's going to keep some traffic in that artist's name moving in the world of art.

>> Well, he, in my opinion -- And I've had this discussion with his grandson, Michael Stick, who's still a really good friend of mine. Frank Stick made a mistake in my point or in my opinion because when he passed, he left a lot of his work to a museum. And as a result -- And there's some really good work in there. It doesn't get sold. It doesn't get traded, and it's one museum. So for a long time, it just -- You've got to have a market, right? So things have to be coming around. If you want to know what a Warhol's worth, you can look at the auction records, and there they are. And somebody is buying and selling those things every day. It's like currency, right? So you've got to have some kind of a market going. And up until that point and me probably bringing him to the forefront -- Again, it's not that his stuff was worth nothing because, you know, you still pay for good art. I'd pay for good art even if I didn't know the artist. I can tell when something is well-painted. But that started bringing things forward. And all the sudden, the auction houses would have this painting that people thought were lost or that one, and then developed a collector base. So there's a lot of people that are out there collecting his work today.

>> Yeah. Yeah, if all of his stuff was in a museum in Huron, North Dakota, and the only way it gets seen is if they can suck people off the freeway to come visit, --

>> Exactly.

>> -- there's not going to be a lot of viewers.

>> It doesn't leave you a lot of choices, so.

>> Well, we've kind of danced around it, but what caused you to write a book about Frank Stick? And how would you describe a book that's, I'm calling it an illustrated biography, but I don't even know if that's an accurate term?

>> It is. It's an illustrated biography. I put a lot of his work in there, too. I always tease my buddies. Since they're not good readers, they had lots of pictures to look at. But I was pretty passionate about this artist. Everybody wants to write a book, right? Everybody does. But two things stop them. Don't know what to do, or they don't know what they're going to write about, and no one will buy their book. So for 99.9% of the world, it's nothing. So in this particular case, I told my wife, I said, I want to write a book about Frank Stick. And she knows me well enough to know when I say something, I'm not kidding around. She goes, well, really? And I said, really. So from that point, I had it in my mind. I don't want to go back on it. So I then told all my closest friends that I was going to write a book because I knew in five months, everybody would be asking me, so how's it going? Exactly.

>> Okay.

>> And so, I then really committed myself because I told a lot of people on purpose so that I would have had to explain to a lot of people on purpose if I wouldn't have been successful. From that point, I figured, okay, I tried to find what I could. And again, the Internet was just -- This was in the early 2000s. So, book was published in 2004. So it was a lot tougher to get things. I mean, today, you can go here, there, whatever and find it, but it was tougher. So I actually tracked down his son, David Stick, who lived in the Outer Banks, and David was in his mid-80s at that time, and sent him a note. Didn't hear back from him. Found his number when you could still do that, and just called him. And I introduced myself. I said, Mr. Stick, I sent you a note. And he goes, yeah, I got it. And I had let sufficient time pass. I got nothing. I told him what I wanted to do and why. And so, he said to me, he said, so you want to write a book, huh? He says, have you ever written a book? I said, no. He said, oh, okay. Well, what do you think this book's going to look like about my father? And I said, well. So I reeled off the title to him. I said it's going to be titled Frank Stick, Splendid Painter of the Outer Doors. And here's how it's going to do, and here's how the chapter outlines are there. And he listened politely. And he goes, huh, you've given this a lot of thought, haven't you? And I said, I know you've just met me on the phone, but here's how this is going to work. I would really appreciate your help. However, if you don't help me, I'm going to write it anyway, okay? So I would much rather have your input in there because I know that you could shave a lot off my learning curve and add a lot of pertinent facts that would make this book unbelievably interesting. And so, when I was done with that, he said, why don't you come visit me in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, come stay with me? So that started our friendship from that point, and we became friends until the day he passed. He was a fascinating guy. But --

>> How long ago did he die?

>> He died -- He's a fascinating guy, too. So I found out, didn't know this when I first met him, he's written over 16 books, which is why he was quizzing me.

>> Wow.

>> So he was considered the historian of the Outer Banks and the Carolinas. So his entire -- He had a book collection. When I went to his house, I'll bet he had 10,000 volumes. And they were all historic works of the Carolinas, rare stuff. So I think the University of North Carolina has a whole collection. He bequeathed it, and it's part of their library. But he died in the 2000s. So Frank Stick, at one time, owned probably 10 miles of the Outer Banks, including the hill where the Wright brothers did their first flight. And so, when he passed, when David Stick passed, it was the only time the National Park Service made an exception. And the funeral was held at the Wright brothers' memorial, and I attended it.

>> Wow.

>> And what was fascinating about that is -- And there were a lot of people there. He had a big impact on that area. And everybody knew who I was, even though they didn't know me, because they all had copies of my book and everything else. They said, you're Mike Mordell, aren't you? And I said, I am. Gosh, you did such a great job. We knew Frank and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done in my life. I've met people that I still stay in touch with today as a result of that.

>> How many images did you look up, find, and presumably photograph for reproduction in the book?

>> Oh, in that book, there's probably, I don't remember the exact count, but there's every bit of 253 honored.

>> Yeah.

>> I have, in archives, cataloged. I've been kicking around whether or not to do another book, just of things that weren't in that book. I have probably a thousand other images. And I've gotten articles he also wrote, too. So he wrote early on for Sports Afield, Field and Stream.

>> Frank did?

>> He did.

>> Yeah.

>> And he was one of those guys that he wasn't just an artist that painted these scenes, he lived it. And he was in the wilderness. He was a guide. He did all these things that, intimately, he knew, you know, what the cowboy's supposed to have when he's taking a pack train in, or if a hunter's there, it wasn't like somebody's missing something key because you don't hunt. All of his stuff is historically accurate, and that's what I appreciate about it. As a hunter and fisherman myself, I look for those mistakes, and they turn me off, and I don't want to own the art if that's the case. And he doesn't miss.

>> Yeah. The scenes in that book representing the range of his work cover landscapes from the Caribbean all the way to the Arctic Circle.

>> Yeah.

>> He traveled in all those places?

>> He did. He did. So the Virgin Islands National Park is there because he wanted to create that park. Actually, he bought it as an investment. He bought about 10,000 acres of land in the Virgin Islands, which who knows what that would be worth on the market today, right?

>> Right.

>> So this was back in the 50s. And he was well connected because of his living, because of his circle of friends and everything else, and he hooked up with, not hooked up in that way, but he got with Laurance Rockefeller, who was one of the wealthiest individuals in the world at the time and pitched his idea. And Laurance was a conservationist too. So between the two of them, they bought up more land. And throughout a process, it was very involved. But out of that came Virgin Islands National Park, just because he wanted to. So it cost him, honestly, a lot of money. And so, giving up land in the Outer Banks today, I mean, you're talking billions of dollars of land if it was to the --

>> Prime real estate.

>> It's everything. And, you know, I'm going to donate this to the Park Service, you know, for this. And then he made some bad business decisions and lost some of it to that, but never got him down and, you know, moved ahead. But yeah, he's been all those locations. He wasn't painting anything that he didn't know.

>> I don't remember whether I said it earlier, but am I right that he started painting, he sold his first painting at the age of 19, is that right?

>> He was pretty young, in his teens. And his first cover was 1905 Sports Afield of a Bass fisherman. So that was his very first cover. So, yeah, he was very young. He was born in 1888. So pretty young guy.

>> Paintings that were done like for a calendar, where they painted at the size that you see in a calendar, or do they paint them larger and then shrink them down?

>> So the really good canvases, no, they were -- So they were pretty good-sized canvases. So in Stick's part, if it was going to be a really important image for a calendar, they were like 28 by 36 inches, so big, with a lot of detail. So like on one of the ones that we own called Surprise Attack, which is a [inaudible] grizzly bear running up the side of a bank, her little cubs off on one side. Two loggers are there, and they got the saw halfway through the tree. And then he's got a lever action rifle sitting there against the tree, and he's reaching for it. It's an action, a situation-type painting. And the detail in there, the whites of their eyes, the things that when you really look at it, he spent a lot of time on that painting. They were not paintings that you just knocked out in a few minutes. So they were very -- And then you had other ones that they were probably knocked out fairly quickly. If they were going to go in the blotters, they didn't have the same type of detail. Nice scenes, well-painted, but not like that. So my cover painting that's on the book, really detailed with attack and just everything about it and, again, big canvas, so. I've never found a canvas bigger than that size that he did. So that was his largest. But when he did one that big, they were all pretty spectacular works of art, with a lot of time in them.

>> If somebody's interested in taking in some of Frank Stick's artwork, what's the best way for people to view that or explore it?

>> You know, there is so much information about him online now, if you just said, you know, ChatGPT, pull up a list of Frank Stick paintings, there'll be about 150 that are reeled across. My book, you know, I did one printing. It sold out. I kept some back for friends. But it turns up on eBay, of all places. You can pick up a copy there. But he's well known. It wouldn't be hard to find his images. People reproduce them because a lot of his art is in the public domain. It's not copyrighted by him anymore. So there's people that take those images and sell them as gifts and, you know, calendars and what have you. So most people have probably seen it at different times, just didn't put two and two together.

>> If you were to do another book, would it be primarily a collection of the images that have not yet been published in a book, or will there be some additional text? My other question is are there any heirs of the Stick family that have any interest in seeing his name be known today?

>> Yeah. I mean, anytime you're -- You know, the grandkids especially, who I know. And like I said, Michael Stick, in particular, is real proud of his grandfather. He's got several of his paintings that came down through the family. And, you know, at the end of it, Michael's not a writer. I don't think he wants to do that. He's kind of left that to me, and that's why we've become good friends. For me to do another book, it's more for the historical record. And one of the things that I worry about is I've got such extensive archives, and if I got hit by a comet tomorrow, there's no one else that knows what I know. So it's like I would really like to get some of this down, even if I just wrote it for myself, so it's there. But I would like to get it out to the collector base because I'm afraid it'll be -- You know, it's like if you think about it as an analogy. Any of our grandparents that aren't here anymore, you always go, gosh, I wish I would have asked more questions. Doesn't mean you don't know something about your grandmother or grandfather, but all those stories that would have been really cool that you didn't hear, they're gone. No one knows them. They knew them, and that's it.

>> Maybe I'm just not in touch with the current art world. But are there any artists doing this kind of outdoor painting today?

>> Oh, yes.

>> That are of the caliber of Frank Stick's [inaudible].

>> Absolutely, no. There are some really, really good artists out there today. I mean, there's still contemporary people. You know, Luke Frazier's a really good painter. There's several. And, you know, it's still a genre that is lived by a lot of people, less than there used to be, but people like me. I appreciate a good painting. And it's kind of morphed a little bit, too. So if you take an artist like Carl Rungius Carl Rungius is probably the best wildlife painter of all time. He did some hunting scenes too. But nobody paints sheep, moose bears, et cetera like he does. And, you know, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, you know, Canada, that's the main receptacle of a lot of his important art and kind of his archives there. So his paintings today, I mean, they'll go all the way up to seven figures. And then Bob Kuhn, who came up behind him, and he just passed about six years ago. And it's amazing. You know, it's too bad you have to die before people realize what it is, but they also know they're not making any more, right? And Bob Kuhn's, K-u-h-n's work at this point has probably tripled in the last six years, and he's a phenomenal painter. So a painting that used to be able to buy for five grand is now 80 grand or a 100,000, and his stuff's going all the way up to 300,000 now, so. And he's only going to continue to go up. So there's still a market for that type of work.

>> Last question.

>> Yep.

>> For those of us that can't buy an $80,000 painting but appreciate art, what's a good way for people to purchase art to display in their homes, just to enjoy it.

>> You know, the only reason I ever bring up values is so that -- For something to have value, somebody else has to want it, right? So for something to get up to those kind of levels, people want them. If you can't afford that, and not many people can, let's be honest. I mean, that's a lot of money. I mean, you know, you buy four of those and you got a house. So at the end of the day, there are reproductions. You know, it doesn't take away from the image. I mean, you can buy a print for a fraction of what that is, I mean, you know, a couple hundred dollars. A lot of that stuff's in the public domain, so. And then frame it. And, you know, you can go to Michaels and put it in a frame. You still get to look at the same artwork. It's just not one of his originals. And that's what I did. I mean, I did that. I mean, not everybody can go out there and buy that kind of art, and I was fortunate when I started collecting. I bought it when it wasn't that kind of money. It'd be crazy expensive to replace the collection today. I mean, just right place right time, like buying real estate. It just worked out. But you can also buy things and they go the other way. So some artists, you know, contemporary artists today, you know, one of the reasons why we don't have a lot of contemporary art, that I collect anyway, is, we have some, but the artist is still pumping things out. So somebody can be hot today and then not hot 10 years later.

>> Yeah.

>> So if you paid x for it today, it might be worth half that or a quarter of that, or it might be worth five times above it. But I don't buy art for that. I buy art because I really love it, and that's why you should buy art and why anybody should hang anything on a wall, not to match the couch, because you like the scene and it makes you happy. That's it.

>> Or get the couch to match the art.

>> Or yeah, that works. Exactly right.

>> Well, I thought that was the last question, but I was wrong. I am interested in, speaking of loving paintings, doing a book like that is a labor of love. That is a lot of time, and I don't even know anything about putting a book together. How much time did it take, not hours, but over what span of time, and what does it look like to put together a book like this?

>> It was a lot of work for me because I had a full-time position and I traveled a lot. So that manuscript literally went all over the world for over four years with me. And when I had time -- I didn't sleep a lot back then. I was one of those guys like, not Elon Musk's money, probably just how much sleep he got. I probably slept four or five hours a day.

>> Yeah.

>> And so, I would work late into the night, get up and go through it. And without my wife, Tracy, no way I could have put that together because she's got editorial ability and did that for a living. So she hates when I write because some people type out manuscripts. Not me. I write in all caps and I print. So it drives her bat crazy to go through it. But she would sit there and --

>> Type it up.

>> Yeah, type it up.

>> Yeah.

>> And then when I decided to have it printed -- And again, when I started all this, I don't have a publisher. I didn't have anything.

>> Right.

>> So I figured I'll self-publish it if I need to. And then got with a buddy of mine, Mike Overby, who's part of the Coeur d'Alene galleries, big art auction that's every year in Reno. And his partner basically said, you know what, Mike, I'll go in with you on this, so.

>> It's worth funding.

>> It's worth funding. And he got all of his money back plus. So it was successful. And, you know, even if it wasn't, I'd be just as proud of it.

>> Good. Well, I'm looking forward to book number two. And I want to thank you for your time and for all the work that it took to keep this spectacular author alive. Thank you.

>> Thank you, Tip. It was a pleasure, and it's always great when you can talk about something that you're passionate about that ties into, you know, your world also because everything's interrelated, in art, range, wildlife, all tied in, all tied in together. So thanks.

>> Very good. Thank you. Thank you for listening to The Art of Range podcast. Links to websites or documents mentioned in each episode are available at artofrange.com. And be sure to subscribe to the show through Apple podcasts, Podbean, Spotify, Stitcher, or your favorite podcasting app so that each new episode will automatically show up in your podcast feed. Just search for Art of Range. If you are not a social media addict, don't start now. If you are, please like or otherwise follow The Art of Range on Facebook, LinkedIn, and X, formerly Twitter. We value listener feedback. If you have questions or comments for us to address in a future episode or just want to let me know you're listening, send an email to show@artofrange.com. For more direct communication from me, sign up for a regular email from the podcast on the home page at artofrange.com. This podcast is produced by CAHNRS Communications in the College of Agricultural, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences at Washington State University. The project is supported by the University of Arizona and funded by sponsors. If you're interested in being a sponsor, send an email to show@artofrange.com.

>> The views thoughts and opinions expressed by guests of this podcast are their own and does not imply Washington State University's endorsement.

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