Zach Otte

January 3, 2024

My Granddad lived in South Florida and when I was four or five, I caught my first fish with him. He’d take us out on his flats boat and pole us through mangrove tunnels and around the flats and put us onto redfish, snook and sheephead. I grew up fishing there and in East Tennessee.

When I was 17, Grandad taught me to cast a fly rod and gave me a casting book by Lefty Kreh. From then on, I was obsessed with throwing a fly rod. I’d sit in class and imagine casting all around the room. Everywhere I went, I was either casting a fly rod or imagining I was. I got my first guide gig after my freshman year of college in Durango, CO.

The next year, I dropped out of college, moved to MT, worked at Bud Lilly’s fly shop in West Yellowstone, and got my first drift boat. I then became obsessed with rowing rivers, and picked up a raft with a frame to row even more rivers.

I eventually went back to school and earned a degree majoring in history and a minoring in anthropology. Most of my breaks I spent in South Florida chasing fish on the flats and peacock bass out of the urban canals around Miami. After graduating, I moved to a traditional village in the Upper Amazon, carved out a canoe, and stuck around.

There, I got to live with one of the most respected plant healers in the region, and I began to study with him. I drank lots of plants, especially ayahuasca. I fished and paddled a lot, and lived like a local. I then started guiding part of the year on the Arkansas River in Colorado and on a variety of lakes and rivers in Patagonia, on both the Argentine and Chilean sides. I worked at Laguna Verde on Lago Strobel (Jurassic Lake) in Argentina and The Patagonian Base Camp in Chile.

In my free time, I chased golden dorado in Northern Argentina and continued studying plant medicine in the Amazon. For about a decade, I lived a happy circuit of an international fly fishing guide and adventurer. Painting and art in general, besides tying flies, was the last thing on my mind.

I then stopped guiding in Patagonia and focused on Amazonian conservation. I volunteered on various projects, both toward the headwaters in Peru and the lower river and tributaries in Brazil. In 2016, I volunteered with the Kayapo tribe on the Rio Xingu on a project to keep uninvited outsiders off of tribal land and water. One of my responsibilities was to visit various villages and present fly fishing to warriors and go out and fish with them. Big payara were my principle quarry. The project was a success, and now the outfitter Untamed Angling brings international anglers to fish with the Kayapo. The Xingu through Kayapo land is perhaps my favorite fishery in the world.

The following year, I flew to Northern India to run guide courses for the native guides of the outfitter The Himalayan Outback. The main lodge sits across the river from Jim Corbett National Park and Tiger Reserve. My first week there, a tigress with two subadult cubs moved into the valley, and I started having tiger encounters, meeting them on foot in the night and witnessing their kills at close range. Before long, the dreams began, and so did the urges.

When I went to sleep most nights, tigers filled my dreams, and in the daytime, like I did casting a fly rod in my imagination during the early days, everywhere I went I visualized running a brush loaded with paint across a canvas. Only issue: I had no idea how to paint or even draw. I wanted to paint the way I threw a fly rod. Besides that, everywhere I went, I envisioned giant mosaics on the ground and riverbanks around me. After the guide courses, I stuck around and guided until the monsoon season. Sometimes I rowed big rivers like the Mahakali, which separates India from Nepal, and other times I guided back on the Ramganga River, just outside Corbett Park, in the footsteps of tigers. Our main quarry was golden mahseer.

After the season, I returned to Colorado to guide the summer season. The tiger dreams continued, and in every one, a tiger approached me and asked me to paint. I rejected the request, and every night, the tiger appeared skinnier and skinnier. Eventually, the tiger came to me, emaciated, all matted fur and protruding bones, and asked me to paint. I decided to kill him.

Just as I was bringing the aluminum bat down on his head, I awoke. Having spent so much time close to tigers in India and getting to know the family of them closer than was often comfortable, I had fallen in love with them, and yet, even in my dreams, I was so afraid of painting that I was willing to kill what I loved—I figured that was crazy. The next day I pulled out some paper and a pencil and started watching Youtube videos on how to draw. During those first weeks, my drawings looked as though done by a preschooler.

By the end of the summer, I could draw decently, and moved on to watercolors. My dream had been to use a brush like a fly rod, but I found that watercolors, though pretty, did not fulfill my desire. I resumed my circuit of guiding, adventuring, conservation, my gig in India and drinking plants in the Amazon.

In 2018, I returned to guide my CO season and partway through the summer, collapsed with a strange illness. Eventually I would find out that I had 7 parasites, including giardia, devouring me, and yet I finished the season and volunteered a couple months in the Amazon before spending my first winter in the US in 15 years. I went from 185 lbs to 140 during that time, and my health continued to decline.

While trying to recover in Colorado, I started painting driftwood with acrylic paint. I then volunteered some more in the Amazon and, in between gigs, took painting classes with my favorite jungle painter, Orlando Cordova Rumiche. I returned to CO even sicker and weaker. For the following years, I lived mostly in isolation and painted my ass off.

Initially, realism was my goal. I found, however, that many times when my colors strayed from realism, I enjoyed the piece even more. The artists whose work I most studied during that first year or two were Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, Joaquin Sorolla and Derek DeYoung. I still study them, and I study hundreds more. My thirst for art is insatiable.

During Covid, though supposedly parasite free but perhaps due to the isolation and subsequent depression, my health declined further and I spent most waking moments feeling as though being stabbed in the gut. Docs had no clue what to do. Pain was a constant, except for when I painted, and so for many of those months, I painted as though for my life. I developed my own styles that reflect who I am and all the things I’ve done and experienced. I employed a bold and saturated palette to express how I feel when fishing and running whitewater and hanging out with various cultures. I started doing a tribal fish series, where I take a fish common to North America, and then I combine the designs of various tribal groups of the Amazon to give the fish color and form. During that time of agony, I checked the box of realism and then let my own voice explode.

In 2021, I was healthy enough to guide again. I began running on-river art courses, where I row 2-3 people down the river, teach as we go, and then pull over for painting practice. I continued this in 2022 and 2023. This past season, guiding full time, offering classes, doing shows and painting as much as possible was too much. I plan for the 2024 summer to be more focused on art, with guiding only occasional on-river art classes.

In January of 2023, I returned to the Florida Keys and fell in love all over again, both with a place and with a woman, and so now I’m in the Lower Keys November until May, and then between CO and MT the rest of the time.

I paint my life—rivers, oceans and fish—and while this can be categorized as angling and boating art, I consider my style guide art. When someone buys a piece, be it a painting, a hat or a t-shirt, they’re buying the work of a seasoned guide and adventuer who puts his life and experiences on the canvas.

The Amazon is my greatest muse, with the vivid sunsets and diverse cultures, and in nearly every painting I create, there’s at least a piece of the Amazon sky somewhere. Everything is vivid in the Amazon, which is what I seek in my gigs and adventures, and now in my paintings. I want to feel ALIVE, like I do when hooked up to a 40 pound golden dorado or watching a yard-long bull trout charge my fly or running a class V rapid or being demolished by a giant tarpon.

All adventures, be they in nature or civilization, begin with curiosity and a plan. That is how I paint, and my patrons get to enjoy my curiosity and adventures. My favorite fish to paint has less to do with species and more with the size of a painting. I like going big, over 6 feet, and it’s like fighting a tarpon for a straight week. When on a big piece, all else fades. Sometimes I even sleep beside my work.

My current angling passion is pursuing tarpon from my SUP board. Today, whether I’m painting with acrylics or oils, I paint the way I throw a fly rod. The electricity is there with every stroke. I love what I do, and I’m pretty sure it shows in my work.

I offer many prints on my website and can ship most places. I still have over 100 original paintings looking for homes, and I continue to paint a lot. Also, my hand-painted hats have become a big hit. If you see one you want, give me a shout. They move quickly.