MARINE ON ST. CROIX — The potbellied wood-burning stove that heats Bob White's studio here was bought for $600 a lot of years ago from what White describes as a "hippy-dippy hardware store" in south Minneapolis.
Cast of steel and carrying the soft curves and ornamental scrolls that suggest an artisan's design, the vintage stove is an inefficient heater but a welcome tone-setter for a painter's lair that is otherwise adorned with a mishmash of canvasses, oils, prints, photographs and books.
Inspired by the works of Winslow Homer, Ogden Pleissner and Alexis Jean Fournier, White labors in sporting art, a type that celebrates the impassioned travels of sportsmen and sportswomen who cast lines into crystalline streams, follow bird dogs through tall grass or otherwise pursue … life.
"Sporting art to me involves the environs of a sporting activity and the people who pursue their passions there," White said. "In my paintings I try to relegate people to a minority position. The environ in which they appear is most important."
A regular contributor to national magazines such as Gray's Sporting Journal, Sporting Classics, Gun Dog, Ducks Unlimited and Fly Rod & Reel, among others, White is gaining a wider audience this month with a free-and-open-to-the-public exhibit of 36 of his original paintings at the Minneapolis Club's Edward Curtis Gallery. A reception is 5-7 p.m. Nov. 15 at the club.
Impassioned from a young age about hunting and fishing and intrigued as well about art (he sold his first painting at 12), White as a kid was an avid reader of outdoor magazines.
The stories were great, he recalls. But the magazine illustrations by painters such as William Harden Foster and Arthur D. Fuller intrigued him most.
"The artwork is what captured me," he said. "I always wanted to be the guy who painted for those magazines."