Fishing lures have been works of art for as long as people have applied their imagination to fashion bone, wood, feathers, metal and string into tools capable of convincing wild animals to attempt to eat them.

Inanimate though they are, lures come alive in the hands of skilled anglers who know how to drift or drag them in the vicinity of fish.

The familiar saying that life imitates art came to mind recently when I spied a sunfish on the surface of the lake. While playwright Oscar Wilde was not discussing fishing when he famously wrote “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life” in 1889, his declaration immediately came to mind as I admired the colorful sunfish.

It was splashes of color in a world that is mostly green, brown, gray and black. It was recently expired, but the sunfish was a painter’s palette of yellows, oranges and greens of varying shades. The colors brought to mind paintings of underwater scenes and taxidermists’ most creative compositions of schools of fish lurking around sunken sticks and logs.

The fish, a green sunfish to be exact, was a nearly perfect reflection of the lure I was casting for largemouth bass. We scooped the fish off the surface and laid it on the boat carpet next to my lure. The similarity of the colors was striking.

It was life imitating art. Or perhaps my lure was art imitating life. Never mind. Doesn’t matter. The experience underscored the reality that anglers and the people who make their lures have come a long way since prehistoric anglers first fashioned gadgets to dangle in front of a fish.

For some anglers, realism matters. With realism as their objective, manufacturers design lures with shapes and paint jobs that are so real that the fish must have a very difficult time discerning the bogus baits from live fish.

Former Bassmaster Tour professional Frank Scalish, of Cleveland, is one of the industry’s premier lure designers. His creations look as though they literally could swim off the shelves.

On the other hand, many lures bear almost no resemblence to real animals. Anglers sling pink plastic worms, chartreuse spoons and spinners and stubby little plastic baits that look more like a discarded cigarette butt than anything a fish would care to eat. Even its name lacks fishy identity: Ned.

But they catch fish.

I do find comfort in knowing the lures I am throwing look like real food. I complimented myself that recent day when I saw how closely my swim jig and trailer mimicked the real green sunfish that bobbed on the ripples next to my boat. The bass obviously were chasing green sunfish, bluegills and yellow perch, all of which were shaped and colored like the lure on my line. It indeed did attract several big bass that morning.

I take nearly 100 pounds of lures to the lake every time I launch the Bass Cat. We anglers love to be prepared for everything. I suppose our tendency to tinker with lures is in our DNA.

After all, somebody many millennia ago first put a splash of red on a piece of wood and tossed it into the lake with hopes that a fish would eat it. And somebody thousands of years ago hammered a spoon shape from a piece of copper with thoughts that fish would find its flash appealing.

And so was born the ancestor of the Daredevle spoon – a clear case of art imitating life.

Jack Wollitz has written this column since 1988 and along the way acquired enough fishing lures to outfit every angler in the Trib’s and Vindy’s circulation area. Contact him at jackbbaass@gmail.com.