Editor’s note: B.A.S.S. has designated 2019 as the Year of the Fan. To celebrate, B.A.S.S. is profiling some of the sport’s biggest supporters.
For Debbie Shaiper Ferguson, fishing is a passion. It’s her peace, her solitude, but she’s also turning it into somewhat of a livelihood.
Ferguson often takes her Jeep loaded with four or five rods and about that many tackleboxes to fish waterways near and far from her home in O’Fallon, Mo. Yet it’s during that time that the wife and mother of one finds inspiration for some of her outdoors-themed artwork.
“Fishing, it is just a passion,” she said. “I just love it. It’s everything. It’s quiet. Nobody’s bugging me. Everybody has their Zen, and that’s it for me.
“And I can study what I want to paint. It’s hand in hand.”
Now Ferguson might not know John Crews from Tom Cruise as following the tournament circuits isn’t her deal. (She does like Roland Martin). She accesses stories and videos on Bassmaster.com, among other websites, to get fishing pointers and to see images that might help her paint more realistic fishing scenes.
“The hardest thing is to visualize what I’m going to paint, because all my stuff is original,” she said. “I don’t look at a photo. I’m making it up.”
There is research, however, and the best kind is observation during fishing, as one sore-eyed bass might attest. Ferguson recently imagined an underwater scene with a bass eying to suck up a crawdad from a submerged branch.
“I really wanted the picture of a bass looking at something,” she said. “I actually caught a bass and kind of moved his eyeball before I released him. I poked around on him without hurting him, just to see how the eyeball would work. There’s not many opportunities to see a fish looking down.”
The painting below is the result.
Since she was 2, Ferguson, the middle child of five, has fished. Her golf pro father would take them out to fish ponds on Mondays when the course was closed.
“As soon as I could hold a pole and got the gist of it, I was fishing,” said Ferguson, who quickly graduated from a cane pole and bobber to a Zebco.
Later her brothers took out little sister on their various trips and left her “kind of on my own.” As a young adult, she went out on her own and plied Missouri’s trout fisheries like Montauk, Bennett Springs and Taneycomo. Her older brother, Doug, became a fishing guide on Lake of the Ozarks, one of her fishing destinations.
Ferguson fished from banks on the numerous lakes in Busch Wildlife Area as well as friends’ ponds, then she and her husband, Jeff, would take their 21-foot Stratos bass boat with a 250-hp to destinations like Mark Twain Lake and Mississippi River sloughs.
“The river is really close to us. We’d bass fish with crankbaits, and we’d catch a bunch of catfish. I fish for anything, but mainly crappie and bass,” she said. “I don’t keep anything unless I go for crappie.”
And she is the true angler in the family. If Jeff doesn’t catch anything right away, a cold one rather quickly replaces the rod in his hand, she said. She, however, goes fishing two to three times a week, saying she’ll be back in an hour, which oftentimes turns into four or five.
“My favorite lure, hands down, is a rooster tail, which is not a typical bass lure, but I have more success on a larger rooster tail, like a 1/8, than I do on anything else,” she said.
While she landed her largest bass, a 6 1/2-pounder on a rooster tail in 48-degree temps in January, she lost an even bigger fish a couple months ago on a new lure she’s been trying — a Whopper Plopper. She watched the estimated 7-plus pounder break the water before breaking her line.
“It’s a great lure, but I’m still struggling. I’m hooking ‘em. I just keep losing fish on it,” said Ferguson, who went online to Bassmaster.com for advice on how best to add a trailer hook.
With a job ending and her 22-year-old daughter done with time-consuming competitive golf, Ferguson has more free time of late, allowing her to get back into fishing “heavily, really heavily,” which will give her more ideas for her artwork.
Ferguson studied art in high school and college, and she has produced pieces through the years on items like turkey feathers, saws and gourds. She posts her work for sale on several fishing websites and a Facebook page.
She recently created an LLC, Twigs, Fins & Fur Art, and is trying to get accepted into some regional craft shows. Her larger bass paintings on canvas take more time, between 15 and 20 hours each. Going out fishing will remain her inspiration to create unique pieces, because she said there’s more to bass than the iconic artwork that graced Bassmaster Magazine covers in her youth.
“I want to give a different perspective,” she said. “Bass have a lot of different habitat and things they do that aren’t just jumping out of the water with a lure in their mouth.”
An unusual catch influenced one of her latest works.
“I was using a Whopper Plopper and, of all things, a bluegill hit it,” she said. “It was the most beautiful bluegill, so I thought I have to paint that bluegill being eaten by a monster bass.” (see below)
And Ferguson already has thoughts of her next piece — a tough one to pull off — showing above and below the water surface.
“You’re going to see the fish and maybe someone fishing for it. Either that or the fish is going to be coming after something on top of the water, something natural … maybe dragonflies on the surface or a small bird flying.”
Ferguson hopes to long enjoy exploring the region’s waterways and discovering more ideas, and try to never again dunk her “paint brush in her coffee,” so that she continues to add the joy of painting to her joy of fishing.