Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, February 23, 1991 TAG: 9102230381
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CHRIS GLADDEN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It is an unintentionally symbolic observation.
The box is full of sporting and nature publications that contain Ring's realistic illustrations of animals and sportsmen - Virginia Wildlife, Sports Afield, Fly-fishing Quarterly, North American Hunter and Eagle Fishing Annual among others.
For the more than 20 years that Ring has worked as an outdoors artist, his occupation and his life have been inextricably connected.
When he's not at his easel, Ring is in the field with his bird dog, on rivers and swamps in his canoe or wading the creeks of Virginia with a fly rod and some popper bugs in search of small-mouth bass.
"Everything I do is related to the outdoors - hunting, fishing, flowers, hiking," Ring says.
In fact, it has been rumored that Ring took his wife, Fleda, frog-gigging on their first date.
"That's not true," he says indignantly. "I took her frog-gigging on the second date. I took her to see `Tom Jones' on the first date."
Just recently, Ring illustrated his first hardback book. It is appropriately titled "Great Fishing Adventures." The book, published by the North American Fishing Club, consists of real-life angling experiences and depicts sportsmen in various predicaments - many dangerous. Included among them are battles with wasps, snakes and a mako shark. Ring provided more than 80 illustrations that he drew in two months.
"That's more than I've done in a year," he says. "I like pressure."
In the early and mid-1970s, Ring and his art were periodically featured on the art pages of this newspaper. Ironically, that was when the Roanoke native was living in Ashland. Since Ring and Fleda moved to Smith Mountain Lake in 1977, the artist has kept a lower profile, but has continued to combine his work and his lifestyle in typical fashion.
The Rings live with their bird dogs on 16 acres of wooded lake land in Franklin County. Their two daughters are grown. One is studying "sensible art" - commercial art. The other is aiming for a career in education.
Behind the spacious house that overlooks a knock-out section of shoreline is the building where Ring works. You couldn't exactly call it a studio because only a corner of Ring's office is devoted to an easel and palettes. The rest is filled with shelves of sporting books, books on natural history, English novels and a few macabre relics from a "darned good anatomy course" that Ring took. These are animal skulls and a human skull with scorch marks on it. It was given to Ring by a doctor and the scorch marks were the result of justice meted out in Virginia's electric chair.
"Old Sparky got him," Ring says.
The rest of the building is occupied by Ring's woodworking and metalworking shop (space that on occasion has doubled as a place to butcher hogs); a blacksmith shop; a darkroom where Ring develops photos of his artwork; and a room for tying flies and reloading shotgun shells. Fishing equipment is everywhere. There are fly rods and surf rods and the battered inexpensive jobs that Ring uses to catch breakfast.
Though he will travel miles for a good small-mouth bass or trout stream, he doesn't go for the big stripers that anglers on Smith Mountain Lake covet. Instead, he puts out five or six poles in stationary rod holders to entice six-pound catfish to his table. Anything bigger is too tough, Ring says. He sizes his bait accordingly.
"I'll put a nail through the catfish's head, skin it and pass it through the door to Fleda and we'll eat it in half an hour," Ring says.
Peter Ring attributes his lifelong attraction to the outdoors to the time he spent on his grandfather's farm, land now occupied by Valley View Mall. It was on the farm that he learned to weld, to fish and hunt and to drive the 1950 Super A tractor that he still owns.
He also drew animals. Ring's major boyhood ambition was to illustrate the cover of Virginia Wildlife.
That ambition was realized, but not until Ring had first been blinded in one eye by multiple sclerosis. It's a disease of the nervous system that Ring still battles, but one he hasn't let stand in the way of his art or his outdoor activity. A back problem actually has affected his career more than MS, according to the 48-year-old artist. But multiple sclerosis still affects his depth of field causing him to miss the canvas at times. "I paint a lot of air," Ring says. "MS just comes and goes. It's real chicken. It sneaks up on you".
Ring was a struggling sculpture student at Richmond Professional Institute - now Virginia Commonwealth University - when he sold his first cover painting to Virginia Wildlife.
"I painted at night and they bought it," he recalls. "We were so damn hungry I painted anything that could sell."
Though Ring received his master's degree in sculpture, he found drawing and painting to be more of a dependable way to earn money.
After college, he moved to his wife's hometown of Ashland, near Richmond, and fell in love with the Chesapeake Bay and the swamp country in that part of the state.
He became a float-fishing guide and continued to sell his illustrations to magazines. In order to raise public awareness of the value of swamps, Ring organized a swamp-in of wildlife artists in the Great Dismal Swamp. With corporate backing, he threw a weekend-long expedition into the swamp for nationally known artists.
Ring continues to place his paintings in galleries in New Orleans and New York City and White House Galleries in Roanoke. He also paints portraits of dogs and people for commission. They generally have outdoor settings.
"I don't do women in evening dresses or guys in ties with their hands on a book. No way," he says. A collector can buy a Ring painting for $1,000 and drawings are less. He's not painting the large, time-consuming paintings with $5,000 price tags like he once did. They take too much time, he says.
Time is something that Ring is acutely aware of. There's a lot to do around his house. Target-shooting to practice, a garden to tend, a tractor to keep running and shells to load. Woods to walk miles through in an effort to control his MS. Machinery to repair and hams to be cured and rod holders to weld and catfish to catch and squirrels to hunt and a banjo to pick. There once was fine antique reproduction furniture to be built, but Ring doesn't do much of that anymore.
"I'm too busy fixing crap to build things," he says.
Standing in the way of all that is his art.
"I spent yesterday from eight o'clock to one o'clock just mixing colors," Ring notes.
"Art isn't fun. It's just another job. It's fun thinking about what you're going to do, but it's finishing the damned thing . . ."
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by CNB