Don Balke (B. 1933) "Fishing Flies" Signed lower right. Watercolor on Illustration Board. Provenance: Collection of James A. Helzer (1946-2008), Founder of Unicover Corporation. This painting was originally featured on the Fleetwood First Day Combination Cover of the Legendary Fishing Flies booklet issued May 31, 1991. Although artificial flies for fishing have been with us since about 200 A.D., they were used until relatively recently for food gathering only. But in the last half of the 19th Century, knickered, top-hatted gentlemen and their gillies raised the craft of flytying to an art form, making it "respectable" to catch fish merely for sport or leisure. Since then, artificial flies have seen tremendous evolution in popularity, resulting in literally tens of thousands of designs. Once used almost exclusively for Trout and Atlantic Salmon, flies have now been tied and used successfully for almost all sporting species. The painting depicts a fishing "fly" which is actually meant to look like a small fish being used to lure the most elusive of saltwater quarries -- the Permit. The Permit, Family Carangidae. These fish are gray in color with dark or iridescent blue above and they have shading to silvery sides. In dark waters they show golden tints around the breast. Small permit have teeth on their tongue (none on pompano) but no scutes. Their dorsal fin is inserted directly above that of the anal fin. A similar fish is the pompano, T. carolinus. The permit is deeper bodied, its dorsal body profile forms an angle at the insertion of second dorsal fin and the pompano rarely grow larger than 6 pounds, whereas the permit commonly grows to 40 pounds. The permit fish is typically found offshore on wrecks and debris or inshore on grass flats, sand flats, and in channels. Overall Size: 21 x 19 in. Unframed. (B13040)