The word extraterrestrial comes to mind, though not in the flyingsaucer sense, but instead only that there was no soul better-suited for living on this Earth, and no soul less capable of surviving, remaining tethered and attached to, the buffetings and general turbulence of the times. Russell Chatham’s art was his life — there are still a few like this out there — but the much greater trick, his life was also his art. I’m thinking of an epigram by his friend Jim Harrison: “We loved the Earth but could not stay.” And this from Wallace Stevens: “The greatest poverty is not to live in a physical world.”
Though I published a book with Russell’s Clark City Press, I rarely saw him when he lived in Montana, where, distracted, he often struggled mightily. There were few parties where he was not present, but those are rarely the places to visit with a person at length. He was always a magnificent, old-school correspondent, sometimes punctual while other times waiting weeks to respond — but always writing back. The envelope with his elegant letterhead, the ink ribbon hammered into the fiber with such integrity it seemed one could still feel the trembling resonance of each key’s clacking thunderstrike — the occasional micro-fraying of the paper’s cotton threads beneath the correspondent’s punctuations indented upon the page with his signature indignation, despair, euphoria, ecstasy. One could almost read his missives by touch alone. He had no filters to the world. It’s why his paintings are the way they are.
Our friendship deepened when Russell returned to California, where he had grown up and where he had started to paint, if not quite having learned. That would come later, when he went to Montana, where he said he unlearned everything he thought he knew — had to learn to
