Artist David Danforth had one helluva summer. He and his merry band of fly anglers spent more than two months in Mexico, Belize and Costa Rica, where Danforth painted murals on three lodges and the group collaborated on a film called King of Color.
They also fished a ton.
Danforth’s paintings are loud and bold, full of color and motion, a mashup of street art and abstract with a nod toward Basquiat and a touch of Indiana Jones. You certainly wouldn’t mistake his work for Winslow Homer’s. “I’m trying to make fishing cool to people who weren’t raised in it,” says the 39-year-old angler from Tampa, Florida. “I’m trying to put power, color and motion into these fish — to show that fishing is more than just sitting on a dock for five hours and not getting a bite.”
Through the magic of art, Danforth’s permit, tarpon and assorted gamefish burst from the confines of a canvas or a lodge wall into one’s imagination, perhaps sparking a wistful memory from the viewer.
Fishing is an adventure for the painter, who began fishing as a toddler and whose grandfather was a traveling preacher and commercial fisherman in the Everglades. “It’s going through a mangrove tunnel in Belize and feeling like you’re in the middle of Jurassic Park,” Danforth says. “Catching these monsters that are just exploding with power. [Non-anglers] have no idea what it’s like to catch a 150-pound tarpon that does back flips. It’s insane.”
Danforth met most of his summer cohorts working the fly-fishing industry’s winter show circuit, where he spent the last six years paying his dues: renting booths, peddling his paintings, making connections and driving blurry-eyed to venues from New Jersey to Colorado. The film that resulted from his recent adventures has been selected by the Fly Fishing Film Tour as part of the 2025 lineup.
A father of two, Danforth was going through a divorce last year when he came up with the idea for King of Color. “Everything was just going to hell,” recalls Danforth, who also lost his father to Covid in 2020. “Instead of rolling over, I was like, I’m just going to focus on the most positive thing that I could do.” The time felt right for hitting the road and making a movie. “It all lined up. All the years of networking and going to fly-fishing shows and building my character and my credibility.”
Danforth didn’t come from privilege or a fancy art-school background. Self-taught, the artist is more a prince of the people than a product of formal training. As a result, he was never told what he couldn’t do with paint and his imagination. He was guided by what he loved: fishing and spending time on the water with friends and family. “I was one of those baptized-in-the-ocean type of kids,” Danforth says. “I grew up in the Gulf of Mexico and Tampa Bay.”
I interviewed six people who either traveled with Danforth or ran one of the lodges he visited. Each spoke of him with affection and a little awe. “He’s salt of the earth and born of the streets,” says Jesse Colten, who is 34 and owns and operates the Xflats lodge in the small town of Xcalak, Mexico. “He doesn’t strike me as a guy who’s been skipping along the yellow brick road. He has one of the biggest capacities for friendship of anyone I’ve ever met.”
Xflats is on the southern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula. The lodge is on Chetumal Bay, which is known for excellent permit fishing, but also offers shots at tarpon, bonefish and other species.
Endless Summer
If the film had a subtitle, it might be: The Endless Summer of Fly-Fishing, which Danforth cribbed from the iconic 1966 Bruce Brown surfing documentary about two young surfers traveling the world in search of the perfect wave. The surf movie spoke to Danforth just as it has to earlier generations of wanderers with a longing for uncrowded swells or streaking fish.
The notion of spending a summer on the move fit well with what the artist and his friends were eager to experience. They traveled to lodges where Danforth painted murals and the team members “submerged” themselves in the local communities and bonded like family. “We went into the jungle. We went into the rainforests. We went to remote islands,” Danforth says. “We didn’t stay anywhere near society. And that’s exactly what I wanted. It was an endless summer of fishing.”
“David brought us all together, and it really clicked,” says Chuck Hill, who is 34 and a partner in 4 Corners Costa Rica, a company that has access to seven fishing lodges throughout the country. “He’s got a heart of gold. We have a very similar style of thinking. He analyzes things from a completely different perspective than the average Joe.
“We call him our Napoleon,” adds Hill, noting that the historical reference was intended as a compliment.
Danforth painted a colorful stunner on a wall at Xflats in Mexico — a trio of permit that measures about 15 feet. But the project he conceived for the town’s new community center received even more accolades because it involved the children of Xcalak, according to Colten. The center teaches art, music and English classes, and was completed in 2024 with support from the Yellow Dog Community and Conservation Foundation and Xflats. (Yellow Dog is a well-known Bozeman, Montana, company that specializes in destination fly-fishing travel.)
Circumstances could not have worked out better on the group’s last day in Mexico. With fishing time running short, Danforth caught the permit he needed for the film. The guide rushed him to shore, and Danforth hustled up the beach to the community center, where he’d drawn the outline of a large permit the previous evening. And voilà, about three dozen children, loosely guided by the happy, bearded artist, created an irreplaceable work of folk art as they used their paint-covered hands to fill in the permit with colorful handprints.
“The kids were stoked and full of joy,” says Colten, who lives in the town of about 500 with his wife and daughter for eight months a year. “It made them feel like they lived someplace important. It gives them pride to live here.” He smiles every time he drives past the school and sees the artwork.
Colten embraces the notion of giving back to the community. He says the residents he hired and trained at Xflats, which include 16 full-time guides and about the same number of lodge workers, impact about 31 families. “In a small town, that matters,” Colten says. “The lodge injects resources and a sense of identity and pride. It’s a fly-fishing community now.”
Hands-On
Danforth is the kind of guy who doesn’t mind getting his hands dirty, whether creating art or chasing fish. And he prefers roughing it to better experience the essence of a place and its people. “I don’t go to resorts and get pampered,” he says. “I want to dive into the culture and embrace it. I want to drop the Americanisms.”
Danforth and his crew found themselves well off the grid at a lodge near a river mouth in the northeast corner of Barra del Colorado, Costa Rica, adjacent to the 400,000-acre Barra del Colorado National Wildlife Refuge. Approaching Kawe Lodge on the Rio Colorado by boat, the first thing a visitor sees when walking off the dock is a painting of an enormous tarpon closing in on a large fly. The 18-foot mural is a signature Danforth creation and speaks to the importance of the silver king in this isolated section of the northern Caribbean, close to Nicaragua, that is accessible only by boat or small plane.
“It’s gotten a lot of attention,” says Chuck Hill, an avid fly fisherman who hails from Charleston, South Carolina, and is a partner in 4 Corners Costa Rica. “And it’s perfectly proportioned, too.”
The tarpon fishing at the mouth of the Rio Colorado is considered among the best in the world. Hill recalls seeing a school of more than 5,000 tarpon rolling on top, feeding on ribbon fish. “It was incredible,” he says.
4 Corners Costa Rica is a partnership between Hill and Marvin and Arturo Rodriguez, a Costa Rican father and son. Prior to this venture, Hill and Marvin Rodriguez ran a successful business for about 10 years, exporting hospital equipment from the United States and selling it in places like Costa Rica.
After a serious gastrointestinal illness several years ago — Hill was placed in a medically induced coma, was hospitalized six times in 18 months and nearly died — he was looking for a change. “I wanted to start a business that made me feel like I was a kid on summer break,” Hill says.
Hill’s desire became 4 Corners Costa Rica, which owns three lodges and has agreements with four others, including properties on the Pacific and Caribbean coasts and several in the interior. And his longtime partner Marvin Rodriguez, whose nickname is “Machete,” is an experienced rainforest hand and angler who knows the lay of the land in Costa Rica. “We’re showing tourists the real Costa Rica,” Hill says, “the authentic side of it. Hitting all the hole-in-the-wall spots that you won’t find on Google.”
Like the others, longtime guide and veteran fly-fishing outfitter and consultant Damien Nurre met Danforth years ago at a fly show. “He’s a big personality, a big character, but he’s very genuine and has a big heart,” says Nurre, 47, who helped revive Blue Horizon Lodge in Belize in 2018 and now handles its sales and marketing. “That’s admirable and not always common in the world today. He’s a very creative person.”
Danforth has painted several tarpon and permit murals at Blue Horizon over two years, including one this past summer. The lodge is known for its permit. Nurre, who is from Bend, Oregon, has long been a fan of Danforth’s art, some of which hangs from his walls. He even had Danforth design a tarpon-permit-bonefish grand slam tattoo that he proudly displays.
Abstract as it is, Danforth’s art is clearly created by someone who knows fish, which is important when trying to entice an angler into a purchase. If he’s painting your special fish, you know how it looks, moves and behaves. “You get a sense that the guy goes fishing,” Nurre says. “He knows these fish. He gives them an accurate personality.”
Danforth lives to fish and especially enjoys taking his son Luca out as often as possible. “If I don’t fish, I’ll lose my mind,” says Danforth, who is a tarpon nut. “That’s the priority. I’ve got to grab the fish, look at it, and memorize the colors and its facial features. I need to watch it swim and how it turns its head, how it rips and how it strikes.”
It’s not surprising that Danforth is an advocate for conservation. He has worked with Captains for Clean Water and several other organizations. “Anything I can do, I’ll do to help the fight,” he says. “Sometimes you’ve got to knock on the door. Sometimes you’ve got to kick the door in to get attention. If I can use my talent to help preserve what inspires my art, I’m doing it 100 percent.” Danforth says he lets conservation groups use his art for free if it helps further the cause.
Danforth uses a 5-inch painters brush as his go-to tool, but he never limits his options. “I’ll use my hands. I’ll use my T-shirt if I have to,” he says. “It depends on the look I’m going for. I’ll use cardboard. I’ll use rollers if it’s a big piece.” The 5-inch brush allows him to do small details and abstract work. “And it flings,” he says. “I’m very aggressive. I do a lot of splatters and kind of that [Jackson] Pollock look. I’ll use metallic ink. I’ll use aerosol just to keep the drips and give it that street-art vibe. But then I’ll use standard paint, as well.”
Surprisingly, colorful abstract painting is not Danforth’s preferred style. “I actually like black-and-white realism the most,” the artist says, explaining that he knew bright colors were needed to catch an angler’s eye. He wanted to create a style that people would easily remember, even prompting them to say, “That’s a Danforth.”
A Wonder
King of Color was filmed by Austin Boyd, with photography by Christian Graham. Two additional key team players were Morgan and Mia Paige Miles, sisters who grew up at a lodge in Belize and became friends with Danforth on the show circuit. The sisters serve as ambassadors for fly-fishing and conservation in Belize, and promote the less-visible role lodges play in providing opportunities for locals in the form of jobs and fostering community pride.
“David adapts to whatever world he’s in,” says Mia Paige Miles, who is 26 and has a degree in international business and finance with a concentration in emerging markets. “He has a sharp eye for things and can read people well. And he can make anybody laugh.”
She said the mission of fishing lodges has grown much broader than simply catering to visiting anglers. For a child whose father or mother works as a guide, Mia notes, “it teaches them a sense of pride at a young age. It gives them a legacy.” And, she adds, “even if we don’t speak the same language, we all speak conservation.”
Morgan Miles is the reigning Miss Belize. She spoke of Danforth’s character and persona. “He has a spunky personality,” says Morgan Miles, who is 23. “He’s like a firecracker. And his word is solid.”
Watching Danforth start a painting, she says, is a wonder: “It starts off as a little squiggle of paint on the canvas, and it turns into a marlin or a roosterfish. It’s organized chaos, but somehow, he makes it work.”
