Jean Louis Teyssié

The artificial are the fruits of our imaginations. This very personal collection presents several years of work and reflection at the water's edge and behind a vice. Many models are just prototypes that allow you to try out new materials and develop innovative and simple assembly techniques. They are the projects of modern optimized fishing flies adapted to new spaces such as salt, brackish, mild temperate or tropical waters. This collection presents both flies for high mountain lakes, canyons, rivers, estuaries and large blue spaces in the oceans. Welcome to the world of feathers, hair, glues and plastics.

Making artificial flies is a compromise between art and biology. Art is unique to man. It is one of the means of interpreting the outside world. Biology is an exact science that tries to rationally explain the mechanisms of living things. Artificial flies are the results of artistic interpretations of animal biological behaviors.

Each fly fisherman has a personal vision of the mount and therefore of the outside world. These interpretations agree and converge towards fairly homogeneous results. Trichoptera will often be mounted with identical materials, dimensions, tones very close to natural structures. Their silhouettes can be variable while remaining homogeneous. Creation and imagination remain limited to the frontiers of reality.
Thus are born fishing flies more or less elaborate and specific to a season, a region, a river, a species of fish, a fishing technique. These flies are sometimes wonderful. Some of them not only mirror the silhouettes of insects or invertebrates, but reflect life. They are aerial, luminous, cuticular, vaporous, lively and so alive. They are then real works of art that we always want to keep with us and see them every day. Why deprive yourself of it? It is true that out of ten models fitted for fishing, one turns out to be aesthetically perfect. This unique fly is a reference and must be exposed to the light.
The beautiful flies that we love to ride are always locked up in tiny, dark boxes. They get damaged in these small spaces. Mounting materials do not air out, wrinkle, tear, oxidize and lose their color and brightness. Our most beautiful flies deserve another treatment.

A friend from Brussels once brought me a cadre of entomologist. It was a beautiful wooden box closed with a glass lid. The click was immediate. I decided to display my most beautiful flies in this beautiful clear space.
So I made my first frame with pretty models. Every day, I could see these flies hanging on the bottom of the box. I watched them carefully. Their silhouettes, their attitudes, their colors, their luminosities changed with the ambiences of the room. In the evening, the sun at sunset shone directly on the artificial ones. They swelled with light and played with reflections. Some flies looked dull while others, mounted with different materials on an identical silhouette, lived to the slightest photon.
All of these daily observations have served me well in improving my models. I would start them over with other materials and then display them again.
Every day I walked past this frame and every day I had new ideas to improve or build more advanced models.
Since then, I have had forty executives with very specific themes. I watch all these flies and it gives me new ideas. The exhibition is important in this sense. My friends come to the house and often criticize my displays in this way. Could they have done it with flies hidden in a tiny fishing box?

By dint of remaking all those flies, I was moving further and further away from the fishing world. My models drifted more and more towards the salon or art fly. The new materials I was using to make them come alive made them heavier, cluttered them. My flies were becoming more and more realistic, more and more complicated and less and less fishy.
It wasn’t really important because I wanted to try everything to create and let my imagination run wild. So, I really had fun without limits, without constraints. I tried to freely translate what my brain was thinking.
This exercise allowed me to discover new materials, to develop new editing techniques. By limiting myself strictly to fly tying for fishing, I could never have achieved this. My complex rigs were much simpler fishing fly prototypes. New synthetic materials have allowed me to optimize positive or negative flotation, air and water penetration, impermeability of many fishing flies. Certain materials helped me to oversimplify my editing techniques. For example, a piece of neoprene foam and three broom bristles allow me in five minutes to assemble a very light fishing beetle whose realistic silhouette has deceived many very educated fish.
Artistic research, discovery of new materials, development of new editing techniques, simplifications of complex living room models are the steps necessary to create new flies for fishing.
Artistic flies are the prototypes of fishing flies. It's a good exercise to conceive of both.
My fishing flies are simple and often mounted with new or modern materials. My living room flies are beautiful and intricate. They stay in frames and I can observe them at all times. They are my references and my sources of inspiration.

JLT has been a fishing journalist since 1990. He has written two hundred press articles in Italian, Spanish, English, North American, French and International fly fishing journals and has contributed to five books on the subject.
Creator of collections of artificial flies JLT won five gold medals, four silver medals, five bronze medals by participating in 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2001, 2004 in the world fly creation championships artificial in Norway (Mustad Scandinavian open Fly thing competition) and in Ireland (Irish Open Flying Championships)

To discover more pictures of my flies, you can surf on http://teyssie.free.fr
and more recently in my last papers to page 18 of international fly fishing magazine H2O https://issuu.com/h2omagazine/docs/h2o_low and at page 51: https://issuu.com/h2omaga..._a2d4fa1b86de8b