Fly tying an impressionistic art form for fishermen

Fly fishermen consider fly fishing to be interactive art, but it is really impressionistic art painted on a living canvas.

John Atherton explains it in his 1951 classic, "The Fly and the Fish."

Atherton was a fly fishing peer in his time to the likes of Lee Wulff, Theodore Gordon, and by extension, to Arkansas' own Dave Whitlock. Like almost all of the fly fishing luminaries of the early 20th century, his attitudes were forged in the crucible of the northeastern mountain streams. An entirely different coterie of anglers created a uniquely separate culture in the Southeast.

Fly fishing culture has always been salmonid. Because trout did not inhabit the Deep South until the 1950s, there was no conventional fly fishing culture in Arkansas, and nothing about Western fishing applied to us. T