I got my first adjunct instructor gig while I was still in grad school thanks to my mentor in the Preparing Future Faculty program, Ron Brisbois. The member of the faculty in his department who was becoming the chair was getting a course release, as part of the compensation for the new role. So they were looking for an adjunct to teach the laboratory sections of one of his his classes. Dr. Brisbois recommended me – and advocated for me to get paid really well. It was a wonderfully generous act of mentorship for which I am not sure I can adequately thank him.
As I sat with the new department head, at our first meeting, we were discussing what my role would entail when I glanced over at his shelf and saw a wooden duck that my mom had painted. More accurately, it was a loon replica, composed of injection molded, ground pecan-shell and binder, produced by the Craftex Corporation, which my mom had painted by hand. She had painted hundreds (perhaps thousands) like it. Actually, I am not entirely sure how I knew it was hers on sight. My mom was not unique in painting these things. There were artists all over the country who painted the mass produced, Craftex blanks. And it was not an abstract reinterpretation of a loon. It was a lifelike rendering of what actual loons actually look like – at about 1/4-scale. Still, I recognized her work.
The department chair was a little flustered when I suddenly asked where he had gotten the loon on his shelf. I think he was in the middle of telling me something important about the job he had hired me to do, so it was a bit of a non sequitur. But it was also clearly not the thing other people noticed on his shelf or inquired about. And he couldn’t remember where he had gotten it from (a gift from a spouse who thought he might like something to decorate his office maybe). Then I asked him to turn it over to look at the signature on the bottom. “Yeah. That’s my mom. I probably painted that black” I said. He spent the rest of the meeting marveling over how unlikely the connection was between me and the random decor in his office – and that I recognized it.
He retold that story every time I saw him.
I told my mom about it too. Like me, she thought it was interesting, but unsurprising (with so much of her work out in the world, I was bound to run across it at some point).
Mom had started painting ducks when I was a toddler. My dad’s salary for his student affairs position at a small private college was not enough to get our family up to the poverty line (he took a substantial pay cut when he went from being a high school history teacher to this job – which he loved) and the Wooden Bird Company was hiring production artists. Their business model was for a lead artist to create a number of original designs, which would then be duplicated by a collection of artists each specializing in different parts of the job. One group of craftspeople would mill rough blocks of basswood into blanks the shape of ruddy ducks, mallards, teals, Canada geese, snow geese, pintails, buffleheads, bluebirds, goldfinches, and other birds I can’t remember. Then another group of artists (including my mom) would carve some details into the blanks, sand them smooth, paint them, stain them, spray on finish, and glue in glass eyes. And she could do all of that at home (usually in the morning before I woke up), so she could be both employed and a stay-home mom. When I was in middle school, she met a salesman with connections to Craftex and they started their own business: her painting hundreds of birds and him selling them as fast as she could produce them. He made most of his sales in northern Minnesota, where loons are, well, common – so my mom painted looooooooooots of them. In fact, sales were good enough that she hired out some of the easier work. My first paying job (when I was about 11), was painting base colors on some of my mom’s ducks. I got $1 each for painting loons black. Then she painstakingly added a million tiny white spots, a faint iridescent green wash on the backs of their necks, white bars on their backs, a white breast, the upc code at the base of their necks, and she added eyes. Come to think of it, I was pretty well paid for that gig too – considering how little I did and how little skill it involved. Those ducks paid for a lot of parts for my fledgling mechanicing habit.
I had seen hundreds of her loons, but this was the first time I had seen one outside of our house (or the houses of family members or friends who had gotten them as gifts). So even though I recognized it as her work, there was part of me that was busy reciting all the reasons it couldn’t possibly be: these things were mass produced by who-knows-how-many artists… yes, some of those artists sucked, but not all of them did, surely others did good work like this too… and these weren’t original, paradigm altering works of art like Bach or Okeeffe – they were reproductions of natural organisms which would have ceased to look lifelike if the artist took liberties… and thousands of these things were sold around the state every year… Realistically, what were the odds that this was her work specifically?
But in spite of the “realistic” protests of my inner monologue, I recognized that bird. I knew my mom’s work like I knew her voice in a crowd. I couldn’t tell you what is distinct about my mom’s work. Art history students will never study her style or the ways she shaped any movements. That is not what she did. But what she did was craft, so her work was not ordinary. There was something of her in every bird she painted.
Today would have been her 70th birthday. I suppose it still is for those bits of her rendered in birds sitting on bookshelves in who knows how many homes and offices.
Happy birthday mom.