'I have to create'

Stan Gabelein created stunningly realistic wildlife oil paintings for decades before he began writing at age 78.

In less than two years, the Mason County resident wrote and published an autobiography and a novel. He penned the autobiography, "The Outdoorsman: Stories of a Hunting and Fishing Life," in three months. After all, he said, "I had all the information I needed."

"A lot of people say they're going to write their stories, but never do," Gabelein said in an interview with the Journal at his home in the woods off Cloquallum Road.

In a different genre, Gabelein's novel "Sam Bigtree and Me: Our Trek Across North America: 1759-1761" tells the story of an Iroquois man and a colonial Virginian who become castaways after a shipwreck on the Pacific Northwest coast and travel by foot and horseback to Virginia.

Gabelein's vibrant paintings adorn the covers of both books, which are available on Amazon. He is writing his second novel. He writes in one room, paints in another.

"I have to create," said Gabelein, who turns 80 next month. "If I didn't, I'd just have a harder time. I have to be creative."

Gabelein was born and raised on Whidbey Island. His father taught him to fish, hunt and use a boat. At age 12 or 13, he began trapping mink, muskrat, raccoon and the occasional otter in the woods and fields near their 220-acre farm. The family boated to Hood Canal in the summers to dig for geoducks.

After graduating from high school, Gabelein attended what was then Western Washington State College in Bellingham before joining the Army. He was stationed at Fort Richardson in Alaska and then Fort Knox in Kentucky.

Gabelein completed his degree at Western and started a topsoil business on Whidbey Island. He married Cyndi and started a family. The couple moved to suburban Lynnwood in Snohomish County and owned a vacation home in Concrete in rural Skagit County.

A few years ago, the couple looked for a new home around Arlington, but found it too expensive for what they wanted. Instead, they purchased 6½ acres of wooded land off Cloquallum Road west of Shelton frequented by deer and coyote.

Gabelein began painting in his mid-40s. Fellow Whidbey Island friend Libby Berry was his mentor, teaching him the methods of the Renaissance painters such as Leonardo de Vinci and Michelangelo in her painting class. He calls her "a genius."

"I thought I could see," he said. "I took her class, and I saw things I didn't know existed."

Gabelein found success immediately: his first painting - of himself, his father and friends at the end of a hunting expedition - is on the cover of his autobiography. He works from photographs, and some of the paintings are so detailed they look like photos, brilliantly lit scenes that include his father and a friend hauling in a spring Chinook on the Cowlitz River, Banks Lake south of Grand Coulee Dam, the Elwha River, Mount Rainier and Mount Baker in Western Washington, and the Grand Teton mountain range in Wyoming. What he calls his best painting, a scene in Glacier National Park, was sold for $4,000.

Gabelein also paints scenes of the stars and planets, inspired by images from the Hubble Space Telescope.

"His paintings are so amazing, his attention to detail," Cyndi said. She added, "He has such an eye for color and depth."

His favorite thing about painting is "the depth," he said. "It takes a lot of time."

The desire to write for others to Gabelein two years ago. "I always enjoyed writing stuff," he said. "I was influenced by L. Ron Hubbard. He was a tremendous humanitarian and a great writer."

"Hunting and pecking" on a computer, he brought to life his adventures fishing and hunting throughout the American West, Canada and Alaska. "It didn't take so long because it was so fun ... I tried to start at the beginning."

And who was Gabelein's intended audience?

"Everyone," he said. "I want everyone to enjoy it. I think it's entertaining."

The plot for the novel "just popped into my head," he said.

When Gabelein held the published books in his hand for the first time, "God, it was a great feeling of accomplishment," he said. "It felt good."

In a house adorned with paintings, antlers and mounted fish that's also home to baby chicks and a parrot named Moky, Gabelein is 9,500 words into a novel about a family in Hope, Alaska, experiencing a local gold rush before the big gold rush of 1897.