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On Wildlife Art
- University of Wisconsin Press
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87 On Wildlife Art It was a two-hour appointment with the dentist, who is a good friend and also an avid grouse hunter. His office is filled with wildlife prints, many of which depict grouse. This day, I was getting a broken molar repaired, along with a new crown. At times I wish I were like my dogs and could just ignore my aging teeth. They chew bones until their gums bleed, and a cracked tooth seems little more than an inconvenience. While reclining in the dental chair, I watched a thunderstorm roll in, listened to the satellite radio, and contemplated the art hanging on the walls. One wall featured a winter wildlife scene: three grouse flushing in the December sun, birch and pine in the background. The sky was a deep blue, the snow sparkling, and the birds hung in the air like zeppelins. It never happens like that for me, I thought. Back home later in the day, my mouth still numb, I was rereading a classic grouse text that featured wildlife art on its cover, a scene depicting again three birds flushing in the clear, one tilting away from the reader, offering a tempting shot at the vitals. In the background 88 were birch, white pine, and flaming maples at the height of the fall color season. In my study hangs another grouse scene, so I got up to have a look. It features just two grouse: one perched on what looks like a downed oak branch, the other flushing dead center in the picture, just hanging in the air, once again rather like a zeppelin. White birch trees stand in the background, along with what look to be spruce behind a hanging fog. It looks like early November, the leaves on the ground, the sun softened and low. The lighting in the picture seems true. The birds, however, look like they are stuffed, and I can’t remember when I saw a grouse perched on a log twenty yards away, looking as if it didn’t know death was stalking close by. The picture was a gift from my brother-in-law, an Iowa pheasant hunter who has never swung a shotgun on grouse. He may think the cover in the picture is thick, which it would be to an Iowa pheasant hunter, but it’s as good as it gets to a grouse or woodcock hunter. Still I enjoy the picture since it makes me think of grouse whenever I pass by. Much of our wildlife art is highly romanticized, which is understandable for artists who want to sell their work. We won’t buy pictures of a grouse getting its head blown off or a woodcock disintegrated by chokes too tight and loads too heavy. We won’t buy pictures of hunting in a deluge or slogging through tag alder thickets that cut our hands and cheeks and poke and scratch our eyes. We don’t want pictures of the birds that flashed as dim silhouettes through the popples or those that flushed unseen. How does one paint what one hasn’t seen anyway? Midseason [54.234.184.8] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 12:55 GMT) 89 If I were a realistic wildlife artist, my paintings would show walls of dense popple, treacherous thickets of swampy tag alders, logging roads choked with blackberries and impenetrable thorn apple hedges. The birds would fly at crazy and unexpected angles, and the hunters would often miss. The dog would bust birds, and the hunters would yell and curse at the dog. The sky would hang gray and heavy, the weather turning ugly—windy and sleety. The hunters would trip, fall, and bash their shotguns on trees and granite. The dogs would get deer ticks, lacerated feet, and bloody ears. And I would not sell a single painting. We want the romantic version, not the bittersweet one, for that’s what we’ll plunk down $250 for or bid on at a Ruffed Grouse Society banquet. We want to be reminded of the way things ought to be or how we hope them to be. We want the sun to always shine, the dog to point every bird, and every shot to fly true to the mark. Idealists for the most part, we want to live in that always October when we are young, the dog fleet, and the woods teeming with grouse. On Wildlife Art ...