Kristin Kremers
The blind cast
It turns out there's more than one use for a fly-rod, says Jim Murray, who meets a kindred spirit in a Montana railroad town
IT STARTED with an Instagram post — one of the few things Meta's increasingly puerile algorithm has managed to get right. A reel showed a crowd gathered on the concrete banks of the sludge-green Chicago River, watching an artist paint his subject on a giant plexiglass “canvas”… with a fly rod. Gentle, rhythmic thuds marked each cast as his paint-drenched “fly brush” struck the reverse of the painting, and somehow, cast by cast, the river's own likeness was building underneath. For my Creatures of Light series, I'd sunk canvases in salmon rivers during spawning season, then painted what came back, and reconciled that this was about as far as my own artistic voice for rivers could go. Fly-cast artist Ben Miller showed me otherwise.
Artists Jim Murray and Ben Miller (right).
KRISTIN KREMERS
Four weeks later I landed in Bozeman, met by Ben's genial manager Gary Snyder and a small crew tasked with filming whatever this trip turned out to be. I'd asked, with more hope than confidence, whether Ben would let me apprentice under him for a few days. He and Gary were generous enough to say yes. First stop was Whitehall — a one-horse Montana railroad town of about a thousand people, sitting under the Tobacco Root Mountains, where Ben's studio occupies a converted school gymnasium. The Jefferson River runs close by, stocked a century ago with brown and rainbow trout by settlers who presumably had no idea it would later double as a location scout for a fly-fishing artist. Somehow, entirely by accident, I'd found room in my luggage for a rod and two blank canvases. I finally met the Master. Ben Miller is a deeply-original, enigmatic character who wouldn't look out of place in a Mark Twain novel — so rooted in the natural world that the considered pauses before he answered my barrage of questions felt less like hesitation and more like he was waiting for the river to channel an answer through him. Still waters personified.
Ben Miller is a deeply-original, enigmatic character who wouldn't look out of place in a Mark Twain novel
Jim has a go, under Ben’s watchful eye.
KRISTIN KREMERS
Then the work began. Before any paint went near plexiglass, Ben took me to the Jefferson and asked how I looked at the water. As a fly fisherman, I thought I already had a read on rivers — flow, currents, eddies, boils, channels where fish might lie — but now I had to learn how an artist sees them: where the light lands hardest, its gradient plane, how water refracts colour, how “grey” stones are in fact quietly purple, how sand, weed and algae each hold their own rainbow of primary colours if you focus on them individually instead of lumping the whole river into a single greenish blur. A genuinely psychedelic experience — minus the retching and chanting.
You're managing weight, tempo and impact rather than drag and drift, and every brush casts like a different rig
That reframing is what actually matters for the rod work. Ben's tools are over 50 hand-tied fly brushes of his own design, from delicate wisps of hemp up to a matted, paint-sodden squid pattern he's aptly named the “Slop Pig.” Landing a size 12 dry fly on a rising trout is one discipline; turning over a dripping, wind-loaded clump of fibre so it lands exactly where you need it on a 4ft x 3ft sheet of plexiglass, with enough force to transfer paint but not blow out the mark, is another animal entirely — you're managing weight, tempo and impact rather than drag and drift, and every brush casts like a different rig. He handed me his locally crafted rod, a 6-weight Winston, casually cast a couple of precision strokes, and then watched me flail at the plexiglass with all the composure of a drunkard swatting wasps on a bouncy castle. No room for angling ego in this studio.
“Tighter loop Jim…tighter!”
KRISTIN KREMERS
The painting itself is built backwards from how you'd expect. Ben works the reverse of the plexiglass, marking the water's surface first in opaque paint, then casting back through the layers — the deeper water columns, the light shafts — before finishing on the riverbed last. It gives the front of the piece a glossy, clean, transparent water-like surface, but it means there's no checking your work until the very end: the reveal, when he spins the plexi round and peels back the tape. Every cast is committed blind. You work instinctively, trusting your gut on what lies beneath your latest mark, no direct line of sight, no choice but to surrender to the situation. Not so very different from casting for fish.
All-aboard with Ben and Jim at the Big Hole.
JIM MURRAY
The Big Hole
My adventure was bookended with a few days at Big Hole Lodge in the Pioneer Mountains — snow-capped peaks, deep canyons, bear spray at every gas station, the halcyon Montana every fly angler imagines when reading Norman Maclean. Wade Fellin runs it now, son of Craig, a Vietnam veteran who built the place fifty years ago to escape the echoes of war — a Sam Elliott cut-out whose dry humour is perhaps best summed up by the name he gave his son. Elk heads and trout mounts line the wood-panelled cabin, shared that week with the “Quality Chicks,” a group of octogenarian women who've fished there the same week for forty years running. It's the kind of endorsement no lodge can buy.
The fishing wasn't the only draw. Head guide Brian Wheeler, with Wade and Craig behind him, founded Save Wild Trout to fight the pollution and over-abstraction chipping away at these rivers — problems that sounded uncomfortably familiar to anyone who's watched a British chalkstream run low in August. I was there to sink a canvas in the Big Hole for a full year before painting whatever came back; Ben was gathering reference shots for a fly-cast piece of the same river. Both, in their own way, were meant to put a face on what Save Wild Trout is trying to protect.
I was there to sink a canvas in the Big Hole for a full year before painting whatever came back
A glorious cast on the Wise river.
WADE FELLIN
The Big Hole itself was up and cold from a mountain spate that wouldn't drop until the day after we left. Standard. Three days drifting granite canyons and John Ford prairie, casting dries at margin-hogging trout in hope of a Pale Morning Dun dinner, then a final morning wading the nearby Wise River — pine on the wind, riffles catching the light like scattered coins — was an easy compromise to make. These waters were indeed haunting.
Before returning to a scorched Britain, I finished my first fly-cast painting of my home chalkstream, the Itchen. Ben and I stared at it a good while before he gave my sore shoulder a gentle nudge: “It's good, Jim. Full of hope and promise. Keep at it.”
A change of tack for Jim.
WADE FELLIN
Success on the drift boat.
WADE FELLIN
You can't paint a river's spirit, or protect it, without first trusting what you can't yet see
Both the Big Hole and Jefferson canvases are still down there, drinking up a year of spring runoff and summer drought — the same year Brian, Wade, Gary and Ben will spend fighting to keep water in those rivers at all. None of us will know what stories they will eventually depict until I go back for the reveal. But that, as much as anything Ben taught me with a paint-soaked fly rod, is the real lesson from Montana: you can't paint a river's spirit, or protect it, without first trusting what you can't yet see.
My father was very sure about certain matters pertaining to the universe. To him, all good things — trout as well as eternal salvation — come by grace; and grace comes by art; and art does not come easy
— Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jim Murray MBE
Jim Murray MBE is an actor, artist and fly fisherman who channels his restless creative energy into river conservation — campaigning as a wild salmon advocate, he hosts The Last Salmon podcast, and serves as Vice Chair of River Action. Part storyteller, part conservationist, part incurable optimist, Jim is fighting to keep Britain's rivers alive for the next generation.
