The Fiberglass Manifesto: OAK & OSCAR

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The Fly Fishing Show is making its way around the country and the weekend before last it stopped in Denver, Colorado for a few days. I flew out to be with Oak & Oscar and connect with what seemed like most of the fly fishing industry all in one very large room at the convention center. It was great to see everyone and I came away with some interesting fiberglass fly rod news to share soon and even an unexpected fly fishing story that you’ll see later this week.

Denver was the only Fly Fishing Show that Oak & Oscar was doing this winter and Chase Fancher, founder of this independent Chicago watch company, invited artist Tim Johnson to be at the booth through the weekend.

Tim has been working with Oak & Oscar on hand painted custom dials for some time now and this is a process that takes precision, time, and paint brushes with single strands of fiber. It’s no surprise that Tim doesn’t drink coffee as this work takes a very steady hand.

With the booth set up on Thursday afternoon, Tim Johnson put together a desk and assembled his microscope with lighting and a screen for onlookers to see what he was seeing through the ocular lens. Of course there was a hiccup with figuring out the correct cord to make the display screen work but this was solved the next morning when the show began.

The dial that Tim would be working on through the weekend will end up in an Olmsted field watch for a customer who asked that a notable brown trout that he caught be painted on it. For this commission piece, Tim began with an outline sketch on his iPad which was followed by moving a photograph of the actual trout to the screen as reference. This would guide his painting through the weekend and give onlookers a good idea what he was seeing and how that would translate through his artwork.

With this initial work done, it was time to put a light sketch outline on the dial and begin painting.

The remaining photos in this post are occasional snapshots over the next three days as I tried to capture every layer that Tim put down. It’s amazing that so much work was completed, as Tim was set up in the outer corner of the booth area and connected with so many show attendees who wanted to ask him about his artwork and what he was doing. Understandably, there was a lot of interest as it isn’t often that you come to a fly fishing show and there is a guy eyes deep into a microscope.

By the end of the show on Sunday afternoon, the dial was maybe 80% complete. Tim packed up his microscope and will continue to work on it in his studio. Once the trout is finished, a stream bed of rocks will be added underneath on the dial to look as it is still fining in the river.

If all works out right, there will be a follow up post when the dial commission is complete and then a third post with images from Oak & Oscar headquarters of their in-house watchmaker doing final assembly of the Olmsted making it ready for their new “Owner”.

If you are wondering, each hand painted custom dial
takes ten or so hours to complete and adds approximately $1,000 to the
overall cost of the watch. Oak & Oscar has numerous examples of
both the Olmsted and Humboldt GMT with custom fish dials and are always interested to discuss your idea.