Ducks Unlimited Podcast

Katie Burke Hi everybody, welcome back to the Ducks Unlimited podcast. I'm your host, Katie Burke. And today I have a very special guest, wildlife artist, Joe Hoffman. Hi, Joe. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I also forgot a very important title, six time winning federal duck stamp. Yeah, I guess. It seems bizarre to me. It doesn't seem like I've been doing it that six years, much less have won six. Yeah, it has to be more than that because it's like three year break between. Well, it's actually a four year break. You can't enter the next three contests. Okay, yes, the four year break.

Joe Hautman From the day you win, it's four years before you can win again. Yeah, that's okay. So your brother hit six first last year, right? Yeah, the little.

Katie Burke Little brother, right? He's a little brother.

Joe Hautman Yeah. And then before that was Maynard Reese, he'd been five. Maynard, yeah, he won five. And then I think there was a, is there a bigger drop off after that? I can't remember. No one ever keeps looking back.

Katie Burke Not sure. I know there's this one person who's won three times, but. Well, your brother brother. Well, that's true.

Joe Hautman He's one of them. Yeah. All right. So when I usually start this podcast with someone who hasn't been on, one of the things I like to talk about is kind of like how you got into your love for the outdoors, yours, particularly with art, like how did that all begin as a kid and like how to get to where you are. So I'm going to do this a little different because I know with your background, your parents had a big influence. So, but both separately in their own way. So how,

Katie Burke what was that like growing up in Minnesota and kind of where did it all kind of start for you? Well, as long as I can remember, art was a thing in the house. My mom was a artist, was a commercial artist before she was married. And then she started having us kids, there's seven seven kids. Right. And you're the oldest, right? No, no. I have two older brothers.

Joe Hautman Okay. You're just the oldest artist. Well, you have also a sister too.

Katie Burke I had a sister who was an artist and my oldest brother is the only one of the brothers who actually went to art school. Oh, really? He went to the MCAT Minneapolis College of Art and Design. And for a few years, but he's not doing artwork now. He actually liked writing novels. So he's

Joe Hautman writing novels for a living. Yeah. It's a very creative family. I guess the creativity is something we all share. So what was your mom doing?

Katie Burke She kept painting with her friends that she had from art school. So it was very common to come home and my mom would be there with her friends painting. And there was always paper and crayons and paints around the house. So it was just seemed like a totally natural thing to do art. And so we all did as kids. And my dad also painted before he was married. Oh, really? And we never saw him paint anything. He kind of just, he didn't do that anymore. But I have a painting over the fireplace in my house that he painted, I think in the forties. It was ducks, a canvas backs flying over Leech Lake in Northern Minnesota where he used to hunt. And, you know, kind of a realistic painting. And he and my mom painted a few paintings together, also of ducks. So art and ducks were always a thing. And my dad collected duck stamps, which was how we learned out about duck stamps and really the whole conservation message that they contained. So it all just seemed like a very natural thing to us growing up.

Joe Hautman Right. I don't paint anymore, but like, I try to make my house with my kids like very art friendly. And yeah, and I don't know if they'll ever like it, but I do this thing where I cover like the whole, we do it on rainy days, but we do it on other days too. We cover the whole dining room table with a big piece of like, I think they use that kind of paper to like make bulletin boards and I tape it down and then I just throw materials on the table.

Katie Burke Well, that sounds like the way we were. My grandfather actually was a salesman and sold labels for like canned goods and things like that. So we had these huge sheets of paper. They had, you know, green beans and corn on the other side, but the blank side was just kind of

Joe Hautman laid out in a large canvas. You just kind of let them go. Yeah. And like even when they were little, like little, little, they still are some of like my older ones a little bit, but I'm like down to their diaper and just like go. It's like we can get in the tub after it's not a big deal.

Katie Burke Sounds like a good recipe for some abstract art or something.

Joe Hautman They ended up painting themselves by the end. Exactly. That's art nowadays anyway. You see enough of that. That's true. Which we'll talk about a little bit later, but I went to grad school in Philadelphia. I had to do an art school there and yeah, I saw a lot of it. Yeah. And I've tried a few, I've do a few other things with them. I kind of like, I don't know. I always, art was always something that was a part of me. I don't really paint anymore, but it's still like something that's with me and I do it as a career and you know, I collect as a curator. I'm always around art. So I found just a different avenue to go about it. But so that explains a lot with your mom, like, and it's kind of refreshing to see that it impacted that part of her kind of just naturally came to all of you. So your dad, you mentioned hunted. So was that always also a part

Katie Burke of your childhood? During our childhood, he hunted just about every year, I think. And he would go still up to the Northern Minnesota areas and that he always used to hunt. And so when we were like, probably about 14, we'd take our gun safety class and go out and hunt with them.

Joe Hautman Yeah. So one thing I've noticed, I've talked to multiple either like decoy carvers or artists, they have this, there's kind of this moment with nature, like this, you're out there in the early morning and it just kind of speaks to you in a way that it doesn't, I think it speaks to most people, but I think as an artist, you're just more inclined to see it. You know what I mean?

Katie Burke Yeah, I think that's a good point. And I think that is a lot of our quote, art training unquote, is that observing and both my mom and dad had that. Yeah. She would look at things and point out what was right in front of our faces, but then most people didn't see. She just loved that. Yeah, that's really interesting. And my dad too. And a harder thing to explain is not like how I became and got into art, but why I went into science is also because that really wasn't obviously in the family except through maybe this thing we were just saying that both my mom and my dad were very observant. And if a bird did something strange, my dad wanted to know why, you know, and if there's some animal appeared, we never had seen, he'd want to know what it was and what the name of it was. And in retrospect, it is a kind of a scientific attitude, even though he wasn't, he was trained as a lawyer actually, and didn't have any science background and neither did my mom's. Is that what he did as a profession? Was he a lawyer early on? Not in my memory. He decided what he told me one time is he didn't want to spend his life solving other people's problems. And so he quit being a lawyer and went into business. He rented trailers, you know, rental trailer rental, kind of like a U haul kind of a company early on it was U haul and my dad's rent a trailer system was called. He wasn't a good businessman either.

Joe Hautman I can see that artists shouldn't be business people really. That's for sure. There are a few artists who are. Oh, 100%. Yeah, that's not in our genes though. No, and that's probably why I went in, like I went into undergrad as an art major. And as soon as it became like I had to do this thing, I was out. Like I didn't want any part to do with it. It wasn't mine anymore. So that's when I transitioned into art history and I got to study, you know, artists.

Katie Burke Well, that was what happened to me too. I kind of went to college thinking I like art and I like science and I took both. And then I decided, you know, you look at what people do with art training and nobody does what they want. You may become a commercial artist and be drawing chairs or fans or something, you know, not stuff you want to do. So I thought I'd rather just keep the art for myself, do what I want to do and I can do science for a living. Worked for a little while. Yeah, nature

Joe Hautman came calling. So you ended up being a physicist, right? You're technically a doctor, Joe Hoffman. That's true. And when did you go to UPenn? I went there, well, as a postdoc. Okay, that's where you did your postdoc. Yeah. Okay. PhD was from the University of Michigan. Yeah. Why? Okay. I could understand. Like you go into physics though. So you would think it would have been like biology

Katie Burke or something of that. Why physics? Something about the basicness of physics attracted me. Yeah. I wanted to understand truth, I guess. I wanted to get to the bottom of what is all this. And I mean, in art, there are more parallels than I think I used to see between the approaches. Like I guess when I was talking about my mom and my dad being observers and that's what science is about. I think that it's that same trying to understand what it is kind of attitude. Like questioning. In both. Yeah. And in art, you're definitely at least the kind of art, wildlife art and probably art of all kinds, but obviously in wildlife art, you're trying to capture what you really are seeing, what the essence of what you're seeing is. And that seems very scientific,

Joe Hautman actually. No, I'm saying. Yeah. No, I can see that. So what made you decide or so I'm guessing at some point you're getting less interested in it and then you're wanting to go back. So like, what was that? What was that like emotionally, honestly? Like what were you like,

Katie Burke how were you feeling like during that time before? Yeah. Well, I was doing the postdoc. I was on my second postdoc actually. I liked research in that kind of university environment. But you can't keep doing that forever. The next thing is you become a professor. But from my experience of what professors do, the majority of what they do seems to be writing grants and running a group and teaching, which I never liked teaching actually. Yeah. And not so much the actual research. And I probably would have gone that way, except that I started to enter the Duck Stamp contest because of my brother's encouragement. And when Jim won the stamp in 89, I think it was. I think so. It was like, you know, actually, this can actually be done. But still I entered it. I started doing it just to start painting because I had kind of, I said I wanted to do it as a hobby and do what I want. Well, I wasn't doing it at all. Yeah. I was like, how long did you stop painting? Well, probably 10 years at least. And I always thought I would. Yeah. I was always going to be like, well, next weekend, maybe I'll get some of this stuff out. Which is why it was important that the Duck Stamp contest has a deadline. Yeah. That's true. Painting and a pretty well prescribed, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to do a spectacle lighter or whatever the duck was that year. And it got me going to do it. And so I was still a postdoc at Penn and I won the contest. And that changes most artists' lives in general. Yeah. Especially at the time. I mean, then you win and then you're off to visit the president in the Oval Office. And you're off to- Who was president in 91? Senior? Senior. Yeah. And going to art shows, which I went to, even though I didn't have anything to show. It was kind of embarrassing. I didn't have anything. I'd never had sold a painting before. The first painting I ever sold was the winning Duck Stamp. Yeah, that's a hell of a first painting. It was a weird thing. And actually I did continue to work at the time for about a year, but I'm kind of not a multitasking kind of person at all in the first place. And so I finally just said, well,

Joe Hautman do the artwork. You know, full time. You know, that you said like having the deadline, I could see that too, because I don't know how many times I would get excited about a painting and I'd start and then I get bored. But having that deadline, I assume like that kind of really kind of keeps you-

Katie Burke It forces you to focus on what needs to be done and actually finish it. In this case, you don't sign it because it's a contest, but still effectively you sign off on it.

Joe Hautman So yeah, you said you worked for another year. Do you move, do you stay in New Jersey or do

Katie Burke you move back to Minnesota pretty shortly? I was there for, let's see, that was 91 when I won and we moved back in about 96, about five years. Yeah, because your wife is still working there too. Yeah. Yeah. And then she left her job and was a consultant so she could be wherever. And then it was like we were free to, and so we, and we never, we weren't really intending to stay there for very long in the first place. I mean, we bought a house in about 1990 and we're there for it's been 89. We were there for about eight years and we never put curtains on the windows or bought a dining room table or any of those things, because it was always like, okay, well,

Joe Hautman we're going to live here for a while, but we never really moved in it seemed like. And she's from Minnesota too. No, she's not at all. No, she's from India actually. Oh, really? I didn't know that. So she was, but y'all met in Minnesota? In Michigan. Oh, Michigan. In graduate school. Yeah. Yeah. So how does she feel about Minnesota? I mean, now I guess fine,

Katie Burke but at first she's like, no, she actually, she loved it. She's from the mountains in India up in Himalayas. So in a way she is more used to cold than, than I was. I mean, she, you know, it doesn't get that cold where she grew up. It was a little lake up in the Himalayas and, but they didn't have central heating. So we were just there actually in January and it was in the thirties, I think, and her brother is walking around with bare feet everywhere he was going,

Joe Hautman you know, and there's a sort of a climatized to the cold, I guess, in a way that we aren't. Yeah. I don't know. I made my husband moved to Tennessee. So he's from Massachusetts. So and I grew up in a middle of nowhere Mississippi Delta. So, yeah, that's why I grew up in ducks and limited and hunting and all those things. And then I was interested in art and then I went to art history and, and came back and kind of the perfect fit. I was like, girl, you know, I had the museum and then this and here I am. I never would have guessed Mississippi. I mean, you don't have the accent. I guess. Yes. I was talking to Jerome about this earlier and I, my mom is from Louisiana, but her mother's from Connecticut and they were like determined that we would, we wouldn't have accents. And like, I would get a manners book every year for like my birthday from my grandmother. Thanks, Nana. Can you turn it on if you want to? Yes. And if you give me a drink, I usually comes out. But if I'm around it, it comes, my husband's like, yes, you definitely get it. But mostly if I'm around it, like if I go back to Mississippi, it'll come out. And Tennessee's got a pretty heavy accent. I was surprised when I met some people from there. Yeah. It was on what part, but yes. When you move back to Minnesota, did that change like being in the environment more? Did that

Katie Burke influence what you were doing? I don't really notice. Didn't really notice that. I mean, it may be true. Yeah. Cause even in New Jersey, I would still, we would still email, was kind of new, but it was a thing. I would email things you're working on to get critiqued, especially by Bob and Jim. Because that's a, I think if there's one thing about the three brothers that helps us is that, that kind of critiquing, critiquing is really important on something like that, where you're working on something for a month and after two weeks, you just can't even see it anymore. Working on the same painting for that long, things can be just wacky and you just don't see it. So it's really important to have somebody that can look at it, who, especially if they understand the technical difficult, technical processes that go into it, but mostly somebody who's

Joe Hautman your brother is not afraid of offending you. Right. And I mean, I can just like, as painting, like you can work on a spot like over and over and sometimes one person can come up and just be like,

Katie Burke this is what you need to do. And then it's like, yeah, light bulb. Well, good if you, if you are, if you can respond that way. And some people have trouble responding that way and it doesn't, but it's, it's like, it takes a level of trust because you can't see it.

Joe Hautman Right. Because you've looked at it too many times, honestly. Yeah. Makes sense. We're going to take a quick break and then I have some more questions about the brother process. So you talked a little bit about that critique, the importance of that critique. And I'm assuming, I mean, if you're doing over email, I'm guessing when you did move back and you can actually see each other's paintings in purpose, that probably made a huge difference. That does help. Yeah.

Katie Burke Cause just the color. Especially for color. Yeah. Because you really can't judge a lot about color once you've scanned something in or photographed something and sent it. You don't know how the

Joe Hautman camera saw things and how the internet translated things and how your monitor is set and they're my, yeah. So you can't count on that. But the, the thing that it, which I think is important with a lot of artistic fields, like it seems whenever I talk to a lot of decoy carvers, particularly gunning decoy carvers, I don't know if you know many of them, but like Cameron, Karen McIntyre and these guys, they often say, Marty Hanson's one of them. Like they often say that relationship with other carvers is so important that actually I was just talking to, I just interviewed Gigi Hopkins, who is a bird carver and artist. And she was talking about the first time she went to the ward competition and she didn't know any bird carvers where she was in Massachusetts. And she went there for the first time and it was almost like revelatory. Like she got to talk about like techniques and she learned so much. And it was just, it was the best thing that ever happened was just meeting other carvers because she lived in this bubble. So it's, it's so, it's nice that you grew up in this. It's kind of like a blessing that you grew up in this family that not only your brothers, but everybody had this artistic background. You had so much support and people to talk to about it that could understand what you were saying. And that's so rare that

Katie Burke you're in this family. I mean, yeah, we don't do a lot of actually sharing of technical things. It seems like, no, just, just criticizing each other. Yeah. Yeah. Cause if you look at the techniques that were actually all very different in the way we have our palettes laid out and our paints and our brushes and how we mix things up. But Jim, for example, is much more organized. Yeah. And he's got all of his paints and he premixes paints before he starts. And he's got all the brushes and you know, he, he's kind of a master of that organizational aspect. And I think I'm probably the worst that way. You think so? Oh, I just, it's, it would be embarrassing to show you what my brushes look like. You know, they're just like scrub brushes. I just, I don't, I'm not efficient at all in the way I mix painting. That's part of like, I, I wouldn't be very good at all at teaching somebody how to paint because I don't really have a

Joe Hautman well-developed technique, I guess, or a process. Yeah. Bob's probably somewhere in the middle. Okay. Well, how was your, what was your mother like? Was she organized?

Katie Burke I would say no. Okay. I can't imagine how she could, I mean, if she was an organized person, she would be in a loony bin. I've been trying to paint with seven kids running around. I don't know how she did it. I don't know. I have three. Yeah. She was, I think she just was kind of very tolerant of… Oh, you have to be. Yeah. Yeah. You'd have to be. My dad, probably not so much, but he was away working most of the days and because he was a very organized person. He, he made wine while we were growing up and he had his very well-documented notebook where he would

Joe Hautman write down exactly what steps he took and everything. It's interesting. I always like, sometimes like in your career, you're one way and then you're different and other things. Like I find like, like I always laugh with curators. We tend to be like, you know, we have to take care of the space, right? And it has to be perfect. And then you go to our offices and it's a nightmare because we have to reserve, like we can't be that way everywhere. It's just, it takes too much focus

Katie Burke to… Does that make sense? Yeah. I know that aspect of, I was on a bus one time and these ladies were talking about another person about her. Her house was perfectly clean and neat and

Joe Hautman everything, but she herself was a mess. Yeah. You just, you don't have enough energy. They put it around. Yeah. So you have to do it. Yes. So you have to do it. Cause I also find that my husband makes fun of me in that I'm clumsy at home. I was like, it's cause I have to carry everything so carefully all the time. And I just let it go. So you get over cautious with it. And then I think you just have to revert back. So I wonder like, I don't know, it just makes you think about what it is about why some of you are neat and others aren't. And what does that change in your process? Like, so I mean, I'm guessing Jim, like he has to take the time to set everything out. Yeah. And would that for you take away from your creative time? Would that be an obstacle for you to do that?

Katie Burke I guess I feel like it is when I see something on a painting I want to change. I want to paint it, change it right then. Maybe part of it is that Jim had a better memory has, I will say had a bit. He has a better memory than me. And I kind of feel like I would forget exactly what I wanted, what I had seen, what I want to change if I spent the time and mixed up something or, you know,

Joe Hautman and got back to it. Yeah. Cause the creative process is different. I mean, you're all brothers, but you're not the same person. Right. Yeah. And our paintings to me look quite different to a lot of people. They look the same. They can't tell. I can definitely pick out Bob's paintings but I can't always get yours and Jim's. You've won two with two swans in a row. Yeah. Why do you

Katie Burke think you won with two swans? What's it about swans? I don't know. Part of it, I guess in my mind, what it was is, you know, you're given a list of five ducks you can do. What were your five this year? Wigeon, I think green wing tail. Okay. Yes. There was a green. Yeah. I saw that. A scalp, right? Was there a scalp or a golden eye? Golden eye. The swans and? I don't think I saw. I can't remember what I saw on the board. I don't remember what the fifth one is. Yeah. I don't remember. Oh, you're right. But I guess my process would be to think what could win the, I mean, I'm always thinking what could win the contest, but there's so much impact with a white bird and so many ways

Joe Hautman you can go to depict it with the color and the shadows and everything. That's the one thing I always have to, people who don't paint or not artistic or know anything about art, it's like,

Katie Burke white's not just white. Right. White's the most complicated of all. You don't paint a swan with white paint. No. Yeah. And I guess what was, so the second time, I guess swan again, I just had to forget. I mean, ideally you'd like to win with something different than what you did before. Well, you did every other time. The swan's going the other direction this time. So when you, is there a species that you're hoping for when it comes out? Do you have a preference? I guess there are some that I would rather paint than others. Definitely. Although, you know, when I, well, the first time I won, I thought spectacle lighter would be the most striking. Of course, I had no spectacle lighter reference. I had to end up, I had a photo of a mount of a Barrels Golden Eye that I shot in Alaska, a female Barrels Golden Eye that I liked and thought would make a nice stamp design. So I had to, I started with that and turned it into a spectacle lighter by looking at a thousand photographs. But, and then the second time I won, they were at that point in this program they had of trying to get every duck depicted on a duck stamp. They realized at some point they had almost all of them. So they started having that be the primary goal. And by the time it was 2001, there was only one duck that had never been on

Joe Hautman a duck stamp and that was the black Skoda. Oh really? Oh, I can see that. It's a hard duck to paint because it's really just got this one entrance point is that weird knobby bill. And

Katie Burke then it's fairly plain and black, unlike white that stands out, the black would be harder. Right. That was, so I put it against a colorful, it's got like a pinkish orange background, right? Yeah. With mountains and things. And one that in a tiebreaker with Richard Clifton. Oh yeah. So that was kind of a- How many tiebreakers have there been? I've never heard. That happened? I think there's been at least four, I would guess. And in fact, I think- Did he have a Skoda? He did. Yeah, everybody did. And he had a Skoda with a decoy. And then he actually won. And then in 2006, he was back in the, or I was in the contest and I was second, he was first. I don't remember if that was a tiebreaker or not, but he kind of paid

Joe Hautman me back on that one. So when you're thinking about how does your process vary from when you're going to paint the duck stamp versus just any wildlife art? Like what is, I'm sure there's some differences because you have all these rules you have to follow for the duck stamp versus if you're

Katie Burke doing something on your own. Yeah. Okay. So for a duck stamp contest, you know, it's going to be judged by five judges. Right. And you can do something that's really cool, but in a kind of a weird way. And a lot of, some of the judges might like that, but your, some judge maybe isn't. And the odds that everybody's going to like this weird take on the subject is pretty low, I think. So you have to have, you can't have anything too odd. Even if it's a thing, maybe ducks do that. They maybe sit that way sometimes. And maybe it looks like one leg is longer than the other. Whatever. Yeah. And in a regular painting, you can get away with that. And it can make it a great painting. Actually, it probably wouldn't be a great painting for everybody. You know, the whole duck

Joe Hautman stamp thing is that it has to be something that looks right to everybody. So when you're doing something not for the stamp, do you tend to go, like, do you like to do something a little different just because you like to stretch those legs a little bit? Yeah. Just to kind of, you know, because you know, you have to do another stamp. So, right. No, I do. I think I do. I mean, I would think just to kind of keep the artistic, like juices burn it. Yeah. I got to keep it interesting. So yeah, when you're going through that process of selection of what species, he said earlier, when you're in Jersey, obviously you weren't, you were doing what we did with the Skoater. You didn't have, or the Speckled Eye, you didn't have a representation. Do you now have basically a representation of everything you might choose from? I mean, now you don't have to worry about

Katie Burke them doing the every species. So you don't have to be so strict with it. But not as much as I would like. I mean, I'm probably have 10,000, 20,000 photos. I take a lot of duck pictures. I mean, I was just up in Manitoba about a month ago and taking duck pictures. But there are still things I don't have. I don't have spectacle lighters still. I've never seen one in the wild. You have to go to that island outside of like Alaska somewhere. And I didn't really have a whole lot of Tundra Swan recipes, Tundra Swan reference. Right. Yeah. That would be a harder one as well. We see a lot of them, but they're where we live. They're flying over at high altitude. I guess the places you can go on Mississippi River and see them. I just haven't done that. But anyway, I did have a lot of Trumpeter Swan reference. Okay. So for the Tundra Swan painting, I designed the painting based on Trumpeter Swans and then went in and changed them to Tundra Swan.

Joe Hautman Okay. Do you use taxidermy at all? If I can find good taxidermy. Okay. I got a Tundra Swan in there that I don't know what to do with. Maybe I'll have to get my iPhone out. Someone donated to us and it's huge. And I was like, I don't know what to do with this thing. It's so big. We have it in the, yeah, it's just in my closet. I'll have to take a look. It's less so because you're doing painting, I would assume. I was talking to Cameron, I mentioned him earlier, and he does these beautiful carved dead mounts now that I think he just does them for commission now. And he says he goes and shoots the ducks and then pins them to the board and he keeps them in a freezer in his studio and he pulls them back out and he goes by the end, I don't want to pull it out of the freezer anymore. It doesn't stay

Katie Burke forever. Well, we've done that too because taxidermy is hard to find a good taxidermist and who you could actually work with and say, no, I want the wings a little more like that or whatever. So we'll freeze ducks and then take them out and hold them up or the various parts. Just to get the feathers quite like, yeah. And the positions of the wings and yeah, it doesn't last forever. Well, when I went to Alaska, I think it was 88, I did get some black scoters, put those in the freezer. So it was 2001 when I had to paint the black scoter because that was the only one in the contest. And I pulled that out. So that's 12 years later, 13 years later. I didn't want to really probably let you move its wings at all. No, it was like a mummy mummified thing. But it actually helped because I was able to look at details of how the bill was. Yeah, it's such a specific bill. And it turned out, I mean, so I noticed it has the lamellae, the little things on the edge of the bill, and I put them in the painting, which I wouldn't have otherwise. And then I heard it, as I said, there was a tie breaking thing. And one of the judges asked the, there's a resident bird biologist. And they pointed to it with the other judges around too. And they said, is this right? He said, oh yeah, that's what they like. And Richard Clifton didn't have them on his. So I don't know, but arguably a little detail like that was something that helped me win that contest.

Joe Hautman Yeah, because I mean, that's part of the judging is the bio, being biologically correct. I was going to ask, we're interviewing Jerome and Suzanne on Monday. They had a busy day today. So we're going to give them on Monday. But do you think they'll ever go back to doing the etchings

Katie Burke or anything like that of switching? Is those, I just, I love. Well, yeah, that is a question for the fish and wildlife powers that be, but I think it would be really cool. I think the way it should be done is not in the artists part of it. I think we paint, I would have artists paint full color, because the whole duck stamp print thing is a big part of the thing too. And the way they did the etchings in the first place anyway was not, they didn't start with an etching. They started with a painting or a photograph and they have an etch etched. Okay. And that's the way it could be done to have like an old fashioned looking stamp.

Joe Hautman Yeah. Cause they have, yeah. I mean, even Dean Darling's was in color. Oh no, it was Pininick. I was poking around doing research and I've done so much research on Dean Darling because we did a podcast and then we've done also cause he's kind of one of our, we kind of think of him as one of our founder, not a ducks limited founder, but kind of the founders of waterfowl conservation. Right. So it leads to ducks and limited, but we did a podcast on that and I did all this research and I never realized that him and Maynard Reese were actually friends and that's who he talked to before he entered the duck. That's who told him to enter the duck stamp. Yeah. I had no idea.

Katie Burke I didn't know that either. I found that they're both probably were in Iowa probably at the same

Joe Hautman time. I suppose. I never knew there was a connection. I didn't either. And yeah, and he's apparently talked to him from then on about, about what he was going to put in and that's really interesting. Yeah. And he's the only one that's the big question I'll have to ask them is about the dog. You know, they all, all the members and everyone always want to know if they're going to get another dog. What would you do if they had to put a dog on there? Would you be excited or not so excited? Well, I actually put a dog in my entry. Was it, Oh, and they had the hunting scenes. Is that like, I had to do like a little hunting. Yeah. I think in both of them that I did that I had a dog. One was a little more obvious than the other. Cause it was, how many years did you have to that two or three? I know it was like the one has a call and your brothers, does it have a boat? I can't remember, but it was like a couple of years y'all had to do some sort of. I think he

Katie Burke does have a boat. Jim did. I think Jim's had a boat and then I think it was, I think it was Scott Storm. Was this like a call? I think maybe just two years. I think so. Cause before that was probably Eddie Leroy. Yes. And he didn't have anything in his. Yeah. I think just the two. So yeah, there were dogs, but you know, and I was like 2007, I think one painting was disqualified

Joe Hautman because the dog was too much. Yeah. The primary subject of the painting. So yeah, it's funny how they've changed. I have a lot of questions about like, yeah, how did that, the King Buck stamp get in? Did it change right after that or did it change later? Yeah. Like what made that choice? And then there's the, I guess it's 1970, I think is like the, the decoy, the Mason and yeah. And that kind of, there's no, you don't really see many decoys. Right. Right. It's interesting. I don't

Katie Burke know why they changed those rules. I guess I don't know what drove that either. I don't know. I don't know. Just like, oh, let's make it more interesting. Yeah. Well, they do have some pressure to make the rules be clear. So it's not like it wouldn't be fair if you're an artist for them to go to the judges and say, well, you know, they can put dogs in, but we don't think it would be good for a dog to be, you know, to tell the judges some rules that are different than what are published for the

Joe Hautman artists wouldn't be fair. And you get different judges most like every time. And so they don't really, yeah, that's new to them. So it'd be, yeah, make it simple. And it has to all be very well, very clearly stated. Right. And the, and the waterfowl has to be the feature, which makes sense because you have to also remember, like, I don't think people think about like, you have to then shrink this thing down into a very small square. And there's another thing. It has to look good. That's a small square. Right. I guess one by two inch, right? I think, or maybe less. There was a half an inch in there. It might be less. I think it might be less than that because yeah, it's small. So you're taking what it is. Seven by 10 and then it has to go down to that. So you have to think

Katie Burke about that. Yeah. And that's another thing that's different between doing a regular painting and a duck stamp painting is you have to think about that. How much does that play into their judging? Do you think, like, do they look at it that way? As you say, every judge is different, but they do give them a reducing, reducing glasses to actually look at them and see what it looks

Joe Hautman like smaller. Yeah. You mean, I would think you'd have to cause yeah, cause not everything's going to look good small. It would change. It's just like, you know, if you print something out, like even like when that always drives me crazy. Like if you like their original painting and then they turn it into a print, like sometimes they don't even get the color right from there to there. It's hard to do. So you would have to think about it that way because it's just going out to that.

Katie Burke Yeah. I've seen a lot of really nice paintings, even in the junior duck stamp contest, which I judged not too long ago, there were some really nice ones, but if you imagine them small, you

Joe Hautman wouldn't really see anything. Yeah. That makes sense. How is that judging that? Have you done that before? Is that the first time? Many times. Yeah. No, it's a lot of fun. Yeah. Get lots of ideas. Yeah. You think they come up with stuff you wouldn't think of just cause they're young? Oh yeah. But you know, things you can't use like neon colors. Right. Well, I wonder how much that has to do with also, cause a lot of these kids are being taught by like their art teachers or whoever's with them, helping them along this process. I wonder if like they're not necessarily

Katie Burke getting the guidance that they need to get all the way there too. Yeah. It's hard because another thing that you run into a lot of, which is totally understandable and their kids, they're learning and one way to learn is to copy and a lot of people copy things from other artwork, other duck stamps or photos that have been published and that kind of thing, which they can't do for the contest. But

Joe Hautman as a learning tool, it's probably a really good thing. Yeah. I mean, that's how I learned to paint. They, you know, are my art teacher would just have like these, I mean, they wouldn't have this now because they have the internet, but I had like, we would have this like wall of pictures and books and things we could go through and she would, we'd and we'd whatever medium we were working in, because you would graduate up and the end was to finally get oils. And then, but we would just pick from there and we'd go through it and, you know, we could interpret it different ways or she'd encourage us to do different things, but we would just pick through this giant thing of, you know, like magazines and go from there. And then as we got older, you know, we got more creative about where our stuff came, but I started with her when I was like fourth grade. Yeah. And you're not as, you're just picking whatever cute animal you want to draw at that age. I was like, I just really want to draw horses for a really long time. She never would let me. Are you ever tempted to paint these canvases on the wall here? I wonder if he would let me. They drive me crazy. I told him we're in the studio and Joe is referring to all of the sound things. I don't think you ever see them in the audience because they picture back here, but Chris lives in a padded room, looks like. He's added more. I feel like just painting on them. They're linen? I think they're linen because I don't think they're linen because they're maybe cotton. I think they would soak up. I don't know if they would. I don't know how they'll paint, but these are better. Yeah. He's added more. There used to be a lot less. They keep adding. Maybe we should paint them. Yeah. Oh, on the ceiling too. Your little Sistine chapel. Yeah. I did all this. I added a lot of the old decoys and the weights and some of the books are all from my collection and the old movies and things like that. It's like a museum. Yeah. We made it. We wanted to make it fun in case we ever, hopefully they don't make us do video, but if they ever make us do video. So the duck stamp, of course, but I've looked at some of your work online and things like that. So how do you, because the duck stamp has to be extremely realism, how do you strike a balance between realism and your artistic expression?

Katie Burke I don't feel like that. You don't? I know it's a very prevalent attitude for artists about putting their style and I always, my goal is more to take myself out of it. Okay. I don't like it if somebody, if somebody feels like, oh, that's the way you would do that. I want to see how I can eliminate that. I wonder if that's your science brain. That could be. Yeah. And I, not that I think that that's even possible to do, but in, to my taste, a lot of some of the worst art or art, let's say, I should say art that I like the least is, are things which are an artificial style has been put into it. I don't feel like, you know, somebody like Van Gogh, I don't think he was trying to paint in a certain style or anything. That's just the way his brain worked. Right. Yeah. I agree. And I think

Joe Hautman that's beautiful, but I don't know. I don't think you can, I think if you try to keep yourself out of it, I think that's the best for me to do anyway. I guess that's an interesting way to, I didn't think you were going to answer that way. That's interesting. But yeah, that's, that makes sense. And then I guess that makes it, does it make it because your brothers also do it? Does it even

Katie Burke kind of like make that thought more prevalent? Like, well, you know, that's interesting. I haven't really talked to them very much about it. I don't know if they think that way. I guess I wouldn't be surprised because we all are really trying to be realistic as the main goal. Okay. Not does it look cool or anything like that? It's, is it real looking is our main objective. So I guess they must have some of that. Yeah. I'll have to bring that up and see whether they feel that way. Yeah. Cause I mean, you all look at it from your individual perspective though. So there's no avoiding it in many ways. And we do know there are certain things we do. Yeah. Which I might, maybe I won't name in my own thing. And when we critique each other's work, you know, like Jim, for example, might say, Oh, you're, you're doing your circle thing there, which is, I guess, something that comes out of my brain. There's a certain, like a movement. Yeah. Or is it your paint stroke or your, I don't, I don't know. If I do, I would, I would eliminate that, but there's a certain thing, which he, and it's not the only thing and we all have it, but certain things which betray the fact that I have painted that certain shading or shapes curves, you know, certain way that we do grass weeds or something that, and, Oh yeah, you're doing that again. And we all try to avoid that. So

Joe Hautman I guess it's part of the same thing. Yeah. And that's super helpful that you have, I mean, I'm sure you've had many years to get over them telling you doing that. Yeah.

Katie Burke The skill is not so much in giving the critiquing, but it's in taking understanding, accepting the critiquing. Yeah. Bob has one that he, he, Jim and I dread when Bob comes in, he'll come and say, look at a painting. You can say, what do you think of that? He may look at it. This has happened more than once for both of us, but he'll just look at it and he'll look up to you and say, painting is really hard that we know we've got some major problems that we need to address.

Joe Hautman That's great. That's a very middle one for that kind of comment too. It's a very, the test notes is a birth order there. That's true. So one thing I always like to ask before we go is if do you have any advice to these younger, a younger audience, like these younger people that are doing

Katie Burke the junior duck stamp or even prior to that, do you have any advice for them? I guess the main advice would be things that we talked about. How important is critiquing? Because as I said, I don't, I'm not very technically advanced. I wouldn't want anybody to try to copy the way that I mix paints or the way I apply brushstrokes or any of that. I wouldn't recommend that at all. So it's just more about trying to keep your eye open, really seeing what's there and listening to critiquers.

Joe Hautman Before we go, do you have anything that we didn't talk about that you would like to mention? Not really. We didn't talk much about DU. Well, they know we're here. They hear enough about the- Yeah, they hear about us all the time. Okay. This is about you, not about me. All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. This has been great. My pleasure. Thank you. I'm glad you came in town. Yeah. Well, we should probably mention that you were in town for the first day of sale. Of the new stamp. Yep. Thanks Joe for coming on the show and thanks our producer, Chris Isaac. And thanks to you, our listeners for supporting wetlands and waterfowl conservation.