For more than thirty years, collectors and sportsmen have been drawn to the spectacular watercolors of Chet Reneson. His paintings have graced the covers of such renowned sporting magazines as Sports Afield, Gray's Sporting Journal, and Sporting Classics. “Hunter fly-fisherman and artist since boyhood, he lives what he paints, and paints what he lives.” Chet Reneson grew up in rural Connecticut on a small farm where gun dogs and game birds were an everyday part of life. There, Reneson made his own boats and decoys and fashioned his own fly rods. He began painting scenes of deer and waterfowl at age nine. “Actually participating in, or at the very least witnessing the events he paints probably accounts for the magnetic attraction between viewer and painting. When standing in front of a Reneson watercolor, you have no doubt that the artist has been there. Reneson's art forces the viewer to use his imagination. He omits superfluous details, making his viewer mentally fill in the voids.” Reneson later attended the University of Hartford Art School, where he met his wife Penny. They were married two years later, in 1960. They are still married and live on a farm in Lyme, Connecticut. Following art school, Reneson worked commercially as an animal illustrator for a number of years before selling his first painting in 1966. In 1982, he was rewarded with the distinction being named Artist of the Year by three sporting and conservation organizations: Trout Unlimited, Ducks Unlimited, and the Atlantic Salmon Federation. “Chet Reneson is a master of watercolor, period. Watercolor is an unforgiving medium, yet with it, Chet captures the imagination of the viewer with his bold colors. We can feel the emotional charge of the sportsman's dream; 'Action coming!'” “His watercolors of wildfowl-hunting and salmon-angling are so deft and dramatic he sells them as fast he paints them. They show brooding skies, perky retrievers, raised shotguns, curling backcasts, white explosions of water; the blazing foliage and dank marshes of autumn, and winds and snow squalls you can almost feel hitting your cheeks. Gazing at some of Reneson’s best work makes you shiver; and want to huddle beside a riverside campfire.”