Squirt.

This morning I was skinning a duck in preparation for a taxidermy demonstration I'll be giving on Saturday.  I plan on having some finished mounts as well as a cured skin to show various stages in the process.  Sounds fine right?  Except it's for children.  Children terrify me.  Last night I was envisioning speaking to them and I cringed at myself as I lay in bed, marveling at what a nerd these kids will think I am.   I was a kid once, and I know first hand they are cruel, and nothing people over the age of thirty do could ever be cool.



Wait, WHY do I care what a bunch of children think of me?  I guess at the end of the day I don't.  Amway, I'm thinking about all this as I skin my duck, and I'm at the head. I'm angling my brain-spoon around the back of the eye sockets to free the eyeball and SQUIRT!  A stream of black eyeball juice lands upon my shirt, my arm, my face, MY EYE.  I have duck eye juice in my human eyeball. This was the first time I popped one, and I never knew how inky the liquid is.  I wonder if it could be used as dye?







After cleaning up that mess I was able to focus on the task at hand, only to find a very broken wing.  Break one, humerus bone:







Break two, radius and ulna:







It's not really that big of a deal when wings are shattered like this but it does pose a challenge when skinning.  It's relatively easy to use the whole arm for leverage when working the skin off, but when the arm is just a pile of mush there isn't much to hold onto.



Thankfully I had my studio mascot there to keep me company while I worked.







Ever since I cleaned my studio and organised it in a fashion which is conducive to how I work, it's been a nonissue having the cats around. Frankie sometimes manages to sniff out any mouse tidbits I have hiding around but aside from that he doesn't care to get into the other animals.  It's very pleasant to have him sleeping at my feet in his little patch of sun while I work.



This is my newly cleaned studio.  It may look cluttered but I have a ton of stuff in a very small space.  Amazingly, everything has a home and I know where it lives.







Work table and mini freezer:







Supply shelving, windows, and Frankie!

Some of these things were never like the others...

Here are some new pieces that I just got around to getting decent pictures of, thanks to my full time live-in photographer James Coughlin.  You can see more of his work  at Snap Blam Splat.  Honestly, I don't know what I would do without him.  Well, I do actually, I would pay through the nose to rent the equipment and go insane trying to figure it all out. Dude makes a wicked tie-dye too.



This is the hen from a month back; I just got her back from the "Other Nature" how at BahdeeBahdu, which received a nice write-up on Cool Hunting.  I wound up going with the name "Nascita Typica".



















This is the hat I wore to the Polo Cup;it's a female Bufflehead which has been embellished beyond the point of no return.



















And this is the male Bufflehead hat I wore to the Devon horse show a couple of weeks ago.  He's naturally flashy so I let his real colors shine.

Never enough Chuckers

Yesterday two of my best gals and I took a field trip out to the Brandywine Polo Club for a Chester County hospital fundraiser game. It was a lavish affair and I have to say, for a crew of newbies, we really did it well.  We parked our picnic blanket in front of what turned out to be the tents of seasoned club members who took us under their wings and enlightened us to the nuances of the game.  We also brought a few bottles of champers and grapefruit juice (greyhounds, baby) and plenty of snacks.



OK, enough beating around the bush. I won.  The set-up was such that the hat ladies had to just walk around and get noticed by the judges.  Trust me, wearing a dead duck on your head gets plenty of notice.  I left a wake of cocked heads all up and down that bitch.  I posed for pictures with the other winners.  I posed for pictures with old men.  I posed for pictures that I may not have even been in.  I love cameras that much.



At half time, before they announced winners, us gals got to march onto the filed and stomp the divots of upturned grass back into place.  I came really close to working my clog into a "steamer".  I'll let y'all figure that one out for yourselves.







A few minutes later the winners were announced and paraded out onto the field.  It's hard to tell but the little girl up there was wearing a hat with a bird's nest on it.  She was a very gracious adversary.







As we learned more about the game during the second half, we all grew a bit more invested in the outcome.  It didn't hurt that one of the players on the winning team is apparently the rock star of the club.  Women were practically fainting all over the place every time his horse charged by.  Guess which one:







I don't know, I think it's more about the gear and the horses than the man.  Not to discredit all the oodles of talent on that field though.  We three caught the fever, and I for one am eager to get back and have another taste.   Where else can I wear taxidermy on my person?

Hat Parade High Jinks

Last week my gal-pal Sarah and I trotted out my two new hats to the Devon horse show and participated in the hat parade.  I went the conservative route in terms of design, something I'm happy I tried but don't think I'll do again.  Notice how both birds are completely lacking in embellishment. I figured I would embrace the beauty nature had given them but in the end I feel like they fell short.  Plus I only came in third. I think if I'd gone with my gut I would've swept the whole thing.







As soon as I snatched up my yellow ribbon Sarah and I embarked on our mission of getting as intoxicated as possible on the free Cartier Champagne in the judges stand. I, to ease the crushing sense of failure and disappointment in seeing what I felt entitled to go to someone else.  Sarah, well she just likes free booze. We brown bagged a fifth of voddie, bummed some smokes off a carnie or two and called it a day.







You can take the girls out of Philly...but you can't make them drink.  Rather, you can lead a fillie to water, but...



Oh nevermind I've got to get back to work on a new hat.  Sunday is another hat contest and I'm going armed with the knowledge of how these things work this time.  Well, not really because I'm still clueless.  Pretending to be wealthy is exhausting; I can't wait until I actually am the real McCoy just so I can relax already and kick my feet up without worrying someone will see the trace of a neon green sticker on the bottom of my second-hand Ferragamos.



Until then, I will keep faking it until I make it.  I'll check in again after the Polo Cup so set your eyes to tranquil because my next post will be full of BLUE.

Darning Ducks

Yesterday I finally got around to paying the piper in regard to stitching up all the holes I created in my duck skins while degreasing them last week.  The darning process added about an extra hour to the mount time, for the two ducks combined.  Here's some sewn up holes:







One of these Buffleheads was just about shot to bits; there was no leg bone to work with, a shattered wing bone, and buckshot in the beak.  Plus, when I was skinning it I pulled too hard when I reached the neck area and just about tore the entire hood off the damned thing.  Sewing that up yielded no results as the whole creature just looked more pathetic the farther I got.  PLUS I must not have degreased him enough because my fingers kept getting oily as I worked.  I don't mind the finger oil (in fact it feels quite nice on my dry skin) but once I start transferring the oil from my fingers to the feathers on the exterior of the skin, they appear yellowed and dull.  I could always proceed and then clean the feathers  afterwards but that doesn't mean the oil residue on the inside won't bleed out through the skin eventually.



When good ducks go bad. Very, very bad:







I'm not sure how everything went SO WRONG on this one duck but I'm very thankful that all the mishaps were concentrated on him while the other one mounted so easily it was as though I were in a dream-state.



I positioned him on a hat (the 2nd for my Devon Horse Show series) and although he may look slightly unnatural, I wanted the wing to arc around the brim of the hat and frame the wearer's face. I'm trying to achieve just the right balance between whimsy and realism.

Duck Doilies

I've been working on two male Bufflehead ducks the last few days, and shoot are they full of fat.  They're also gorgeous.  Sorry I don't have any pictures of the exterior at this point but they're tanning right now; I'll post images later.  Besides, all the pretty iridescent feathers are covered in fat and blood.  Gender role reversal is a constant thought running through my head while I work on birds; the males are always so pretty and flashy in order to attract the females while the "fairer sex" is usually drab and brown in order to blend in and protect her young.  In humans it seems to be quite the opposite although I suppose with there is a flashy breed of male out there...but for the most part its us gals doing the primping.  I also find worth noting that the male ducks seem to have much more fat on them than the females, at least the ones I've worked with so far.  The two female Buffleheads I worked on took considerably less time to degrease than the males I just finished up with.







I don't have a degreasing machine yet so I've been doing the dirty work by hand.  It's a slow, tedious task but one I enjoy.  As someone who relishes the satisfaction of successfully extracting gunk from clogged pores, the site of a fat-covered pelt waiting to be trimmed excites me.  It's an easy solution; no thinking involved really.  It does take concentration though, since just underneath all that fat is tissue-paper-like skin.







It's common to wind up with little holes in your skins when degreasing by hand, hence the term "duck doilies".  I don't mind so much; it's just more sewing work down the road.



Here's a visual on how fatty these boys are.  The left circle is pre, the right one, post.  It gets tricky cutting just the right amount off without going through the skin.







This is all the fat blobs I got off the last one.  See all the oil in the paper?  I feel like I should be cooking with this stuff.







More holes...







More lipo....







More holes..







Here's the second female I mounted last week.  I'm using her for a hat that I plan to enter into a fancy hat parade of sorts, an event which is part of the Devon Horse Show.  I want to make several head pieces and convince some of my girlfriends to wear them around the fair while handing out cards for me.  This hat is obviously far from finished but I'm very pleased with the positioning.  I think it will most certainly turn some heads.







Stay tuned!

A Good Lay

I dropped my finished hen off at a gallery yesterday for a show that opens on Thursday.  No pictures yet until she's been properly unveiled but here are some progress shots:



I posed her mid egg-lay, with one already out.  I wanted the eggs to be hatching, and unique.  I drilled many, many holes and set tiny little gems all over the shell.  This can be very stressful but I used to decorate hollow eggs quite frequently as a little girl and have kept my fingers nimble so I found the experience rewarding.







Of course, all the muscle memory and dexterity in the world can't save me from my inner klutz and I rested my hand in a paint puddle which I then brushed against the hen and parts of the base.  When I saw this happening I freaked out and dropped the entire thing, egg shells and all.  Miraculously, nothing broke and the paint came off.







Here is a close-up of the hind-section of Mrs. Hen.  It's kind of gross but I consider it a valiant effort to accurately portray the "birth" of an egg.  I'd like to try again, now that I have more experience to build upon.







I will decide upon a title for this piece today...the term "Typical Birth" kept running through my head as I was creating it.  This is mostly because I overheard a trifling and pretentious old witch of a gallery owner/NY art scenester exclaim very loudly that my work was "SO TYPICAL"  at the show in Brooklyn. It really stung...and I've thought about it quite a bit.  After so much reflection though, I realise that I'm not insulted by what she said.  I know my work isn't typical.  Yes, taxidermy is on the rise- especially the subgroup that my work falls into but there are many nuances which set my pieces apart from the rest.  I think what bothers me most is the way she announced it so flippantly, surrounded by her little circle of employees who know where their bread is buttered so they smile and nod and humor her while she carries on her one-woman show.  I suppose I could've made a dig at her, like "Those who can't DO,  critique." but I know that's not entirely true and what would that accomplish?  I think when I saw her lapping up the attention of all those around her and mistaking it for genuine respect, I was reminded a little of myself in my more obnoxious, drunken look-at-me moments.  And I was grossed out.  I suppose I should thank this woman for inspiring me to be a better person.



Obviously, I haven't let it go for one reason or another, but it's got me exploring the concept of "typical" and wondering when is it ever a good thing to be refered to as.  Regardless, "Typical Birth" sounds boring.  Perhaps in Italian?



nascita tipica



Not bad.  If all else fails I'll just go with plan B and call her "A Good Lay".