Read this Wildlife Art Journal article

“In rivers, the water that you touch is the last of what has passed and the first of that which comes;  so with present time.”  —Leonardo da Vinci.


Stan Olson Fellows will admit he has a complicated relationship with rivers.  He casts lines into trout streams that most anglers have never heard of and yet they are instantly recognizable. He guides viewers there in droves—sometimes by the hundreds of thousands—convincing them they should stay and never leave.

But it was also a big river, a real one not a fictional reverie, that washed away the creative artifacts of Fellows’ life.  "Ten years ago,” he says,  “I didn't have a story, or at least a personal story that I thought might be interesting and worthwhile telling.  I had a career, but now I realize that I was just going through the motions like everybody else.” 

Fellows is a man who speaks in an upper Midwestern brogue. While unpretentious, he has cosmopolitan, learned tastes that run through fine art, food, music and literature. For example, he has an affinity for the work of late abstract expressionist Richard Diebenkorn (1922-1993) and a fondness for movies directed by Sophia Coppola, hard-luck tales written by Annie Proulx and the short stories of John Updike.  His collectors would argue that Fellows, too, is a place-based visual novelist. “I paint the places that I know and where I want to be,” he says.  “If you do that, then more...