Yuku free message boards

Bob: It never occurred to me that your comments were in any way disparaging. I personally doubt that the "ring of fire" was meant to hide defects in Young cane, but others are free to disagree. I base my belief on the fact that Young continued to offer blonde cane rods in his 1948 catalog after developing and introducing his flame-finish technique. I know of three Young rods that were built within a three-month period in the spring of 1948. The earliest of these rods was the first Para 16, which was flame-finished in a mottled tone and kept by Paul Young as a personal rod. The second rod was another Para 16, probably the second one built, and it is blonde, and now owned by a Forum member. The third one is a caramel-color rod, not mottled but very smoothly flamed without defects. This was a time of experimentation, and I think an exciting and positive time for Young. If Young concealed defects through flaming, he probably would have kept the blonde Para 16 for himself and sold the mottled-flame Para 16.

This is not to say that every Young rod measures up to today's cosmetic standards. For example, Young's varnish work was not the best, and one of the two tips of my Young-built Driggs rod exhibits some glue lines separating a couple of flats. I have no more problem with this than I have with Winslow Homer's fly fishing watercolors, where sometimes you can see Homer's faint pencil marks underlying the watercolor pigment, or you see a little opaque white paint where Homer covered up a slip of the brush. It's still a Homer! It's still a Young!

Rather than say that "the dimensions are all over the board on the rods," I prefer the explanations I have given above. When the Martha Marie model starts out specified with a 13/64 ferrule and 4 tiptop, and later is specified with a 14 ferrule and 4-1/2 tiptop, and then later you can get it with two different tip tapers... well yes, it is variable, as are the other Young models. To make a comparison again with painting, it is like Monet's series of paintings of Rouen Cathedral. They are all painted from the same vantage point, but they are all slightly different in color choices and handling of the paint. But no one ever said that one of Monet's Cathedral paintings was bad because it wasn't an exact copy of another example. I would say that Payne is more like a classical painter, with a consistency of execution like Ingres, and Young is more like an Impressionist, with a liveliness of execution like Monet, or better yet he is like Homer, with inelegant underpinnings within the work that somehow are transcended by the final, masterful result.

Again, everyone is free to disagree. I really like my Payne rod, but I really love my Youngs. I pick one up, cast it, and it makes me smile. That's its job and it does it well.

That's fine with me if you use the phrase. Like your present sig line, it pretty well sums things up.

I can't pretend to know to fully know Monet's intentions as he worked on the cathedral paintings more than a century ago. I do have my own insights as a full-time illustrator and artist. Since as an artist my work is to communicate science, I stand in both worlds of art and science, and have to keep the left and right brains talking to each other. I must balance the desire to exhibit creativity and insert liveliness into a painting of a fish with the requirement to satisfy the client for whom the fish painting is being made, a client who needs me to meet a deadline and who as a biologist requires that there be 68 scales in the lateral line, or 2 spines and fourteen soft rays in the dorsal fin, etc. You can see a couple of my less scientific, more fishing-related artworks in my yuku profile.

I suspect that the professional tuggings back and forth that I experience are not all that different from the ones that a professional rodmaker faces: enjoy the process of your craft, but meet the goals of client expectations.

Years ago I saw all the Rouen cathedral paintings gathered together at the Boston MFA, where for the first time in over a century they were displayed in one place exactly as Monet had premiered them at their first gallery exhibition. A jaw-dropping experience. You do get the sense that Monet "knew where he was going," but nevertheless inserted unique qualities into each painting, just like a professional pianist wouldn't start idly riffing on a theme in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 5, but still manages (if he's a great pianist) to create a compelling performance of the work.

I had hoped to sneak off this afternoon with a Young rod for a "more fishing, less fussing" session, but was thwarted by responsibilities. Maybe tomorrow!