JACK UNRUH

The power to recognize beauty in the backside of a goose should not be taken lightly.

Jack Unruh has that power, and what's more he came by it honestly.  He has probably spent more time hunting and fishing in the wild than any illustrator since Audubon.  As John Cuneo wrote, "Here is a man for whom 'back to the drawing board' usually involves pissing on a campfire."

Unruh's time spent in nature seems to have left him with an intense, granular appreciation for nature's textures and patterns.

I like the way Unruh contrasts extremes.  He'll use a sharp Gilotte pen nib to compose delicate fields of microscopic hatch marks, then reach across to the opposite end of the spectrum for dense black shapes applied with a bold brush:

Unruh makes no attempt to homogenize the two extremes.  Each retains its essential character

 

By themselves, his small, lacy marks would probably be be too refined for my taste.  Those rough black additions contribute power and structure.

There is nothing rustic about Unruh's work.  When he returns from pissing on campfires, he does highly sophisticated (some might even say urbane), surrealistic or whimsical pictures:

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These pictures are nothing like the art of more conventional wildlife illustrators, such as Audubon, Bateman, Meltzoff or Matternes.  Kinda makes you wonder what Unruh thinks about, out there in the wilderness at night.  For clues, his web site is divided into "what is real and what is not."