Andy Hansen happened to spot Larry Green ice-fishing Friday in a scene that set up visually, so he took some cool photos.
I love the intersection of art and the outdoors.
I’m not sure if Hansen saw it as art, but he sent ‘‘the best two, after playing a little.’’
Art at its best should be an extension of play.
To me, Hansen’s photo reached back to ‘‘The Starry Night,’’ the post-Impressionist oil-on-canvas painting Vincent van Gogh made when he was in an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence in France.
Hansen reached for another art form.
‘‘We were out, I walked by and it struck me: ‘Like an angel, standing in a shaft of light’ (Grateful Dead fan here),’’ he messaged. ‘‘Grabbed my phone, went back and snapped a few.’’
That angel/light line comes from the Grateful Dead song ‘‘Estimated Prophet.’’ I don’t think that was an accidental thought. Green fits with the themes of ‘‘Estimated Prophet.’’
‘‘Funny, we were out there with Zach Mullady (I recently read your article about his dad [Matt]),’’ Hansen messaged. ‘‘We were all brought together because of Larry. He is an angel and wonderful friend.’’
Hansen is a facilitator of the Facebook group Chicagoland Ice Fishing, which Green founded. Green is also the founder of the Humboldt Park Fishing Society.
Besides his fishing exploits, Green is quite the artist. He came from Indiana to the Art Institute, where he graduated in 1975. I find myself noticing the remaining water tanks around Chicago ever since I encountered Green’s book, ‘‘Water Tanks of Chicago: A Vanishing Urban Legacy.’’ Not surprisingly, he also has a series of artwork of old-style grain elevators, largely around the Kankakee River basin. I can’t see an old grain elevator, especially rambling around central Illinois, without thinking of Green.
If anyone has been on a Zoom call with me, you might have noticed a Green painting immediately to my right in my office. It’s a full moon between old electric and phone lines between two leaning poles with three distant birds. To me, it has strains of Charles Demuth’s late-life bend to Precisionism in it. After college, I lived for a year a block from where Demuth spent most of his life.
From the artistic realm, we return to rooting in the earthly here-and-now of fishing.
Green messaged that they mainly ‘‘caught a bunch of dink bluegills and a few small bass. Fish of the day was a crappie.’’
Wild things
The Great Backyard Bird Count (audubon.org/community-science/great-backyard-bird-count), one of the greatest citizen-scientist projects, is Friday through Monday. Again, I remind teachers, parents and scout leaders that this is a good way to involve kids in noticing the outdoor world because you can decide how much or how little time to spend.
Illinois hunting
Saturday is the end of squirrel and rabbit seasons. It also is the final day to file windshield-card reports. That’s the most aggravating bureaucratic pain in the butt from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources and only applies to hunters.
Stray cast
I can’t decide if Brad Pitt’s aw-shucks ode to American football and the U.S. had the grace of a steelhead knifing out of the water in a spray of droplets or the muddiness of a carp spawning with its tail slapping on a weedy shoreline.