Fishing guide, artist -- which is his day job?

ON THE ST. CROIX RIVER, Minn. -- For a minute, Bob White looked just like a kid, completely immersed in his boyish project.

White, a professional fishing guide and artist, was facing a wooden easel he had perched above the bow of his cream-colored drift boat that was anchored about 20 feet offshore. There were about two hours of daylight left, and, as if tired, the St. Croix River lapped lazily around the craft, the limp oars dimpling the gentle currents.

In fact, White's hand was the only thing moving quickly--sweeping and dabbing his brush as his eyes fluttered from the bouldered banks to the silver maples above. Sky, water and splashes of green filled the canvas.

"You've got to make a connection with the painting," said the man who claims he "never grew up," paying his bills, now aptly, by means of his childhood passions: fishing and painting.

That connection was made early for White, who has five magazine covers for his art and writing, including a regular column in Midwest Fly Fishing. Growing up in rural Belleville, Ill. -- where the boys in the neighborhood donned coonskin caps and mimicked Daniel Boone -- the love White found for hunting and fishing was not uncommon.

"But what made me unusual," he said, "was that I spent all my free time painting."

White, 52, often went fishing with his boyhood friends, crawling under barbed wire fences to sneak onto farmers' ponds. When the fishing trips were done, his friends would run off and play ball. But White would run to the drawing table in his bedroom, to try to paint from memory everything he had just seen. His appreciation for the beauty around him never faded.

The spot where he stopped on this early July evening was one he came to often: a pretty little patch along the shoreline, just outside of Lake Alice and about 15 miles from Taylors Falls, Minn.; apparently a great spot for smallmouth bass. "Classic St. Croix," he said. Just downstream, the long shadows dipped into a right bend in the river, disappearing into gray.

Gray splashed against the canvas, and the air smelled like turpentine and linseed, odors that are relics to his past.

"I love that smell," he said. "I always paint with oil. They say your sense of smell is the most powerful trigger of memory."

White still remembers first smelling the distinctive scent when, at about age 7, his father came home one night with an oil painting set. "And that was it," he said, smiling. As an art major at Southern Illinois University, the "rat-trap old house" he shared with five other art students in Edwardsville reeked of it.

But after three years of living in the fumes, White got a whiff of what he thought had to be common sense. Doubtful his "beer money" hobby would ever make him a serious living, he graduated with a degree in psychology and in 1980 moved to Minneapolis to work at a day treatment facility for troubled kids. On the side, he worked at sporting equipment chain Burger Brothers, and one fall day, a fellow employee came into the shop with stories of a fishing lodge in Alaska. Intrigued, White applied to the lodge, Golden Horn, to be a fishing guide, and he laughed now as he recalled his father's muted response when he told him he was quitting his job to go north.

But White, it turned out, had found the ideal environment for his talents. As a guide, he worked with many repeat clients who grew to trust his expertise. Over time, when his anglers asked what he did when he wasn't fishing, he'd say: "I paint. I paint this."

After two years, Florida International, a fishing booking agency, offered him a guiding job in Argentina, and a routine was set. He worked summers in Alaska, returned to Minnesota in October to "paint my brains out," flew to Argentina in January, and stayed there until April, when he again traveled to Minnesota to paint furiously.

"I'm one of the luckiest people on the planet," he said, "because I found a way to make my love for fishing pay, and that job in turn provided me with a source of collectors for my work.

"It was a perfect dovetail, and I never planned it. There was no connivance on my part.

While he spoke, the soft waves knocking steadily against the boat sole, his hands never stopped.

"The paint dries fast out here," he said.

When White is on the river, he tries to wash the whole canvas in color--a sort of foundation for what likely will end up a 30-to-40-hour project.

"I like to try and catch the pattern of the sky," he said, looking slightly unsatisfied, even as the white pines seemed to dance off the fabric. "This is the ugly baby stage of the painting."

There, on the river, is the moment of birth. The painting's personality--soft and summery is how he would describe this one -- already is taking shape.

"Painting, it's like raising a child," he said. "Some paint themselves, and some you really struggle with, feel like walking away from, you fight with it. And somehow those end up usually being the ones you're closest with.

"You get to the point where it becomes a dilemma, when to bow out, when you're finished. It becomes a part of your life, it can be really hard to let go."

Two years ago, White sold a painting to a man who gave it to his father in gratitude for trips first taken to Golden Horn Lodge when he was a freckled-faced 9-year-old.

White had guided the pair, and painted the father wading through the Agulakpak River in this piece.

"What I love about guiding is the people," White said, standing, finally, in his wood-paneled art studio behind his home at Marine on St. Croix, thumbing through striking canvases of rivers he had rowed, people he had met, and moments that seemed to him as clear as the cobalt, oil-painted sky.

"Catching fish is probably the least important part."