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Illustration Ryan Kirby/NWTF |
Shapes
by Tom Kelly
While I am willing to admit that I cannot paint at all, and can barely write English, I can, however, look. And it is my firm opinion that there are only two people, alive or dead, who have painted turkeys and have caught the shape of a turkey exactly.
John James Audubon didn’t even come close. The famous picture of a turkey that he did, the one that has been reproduced in magazines for the past hundred years, is a picture of a dead turkey lying on the floor in front of his easel. Audubon’s turkey has his neck drawn back between his shoulders exactly like a severely crippled bookkeeper with arthritis, and live wild turkeys never look like worn out bookkeepers.
The only two painters who have caught a turkey’s shape exactly are Ned Smith, a naturalist from Pennsylvania, and William Harris, a sign painter from Camden, Ala. Both of these men are long dead, and to this day I have not seen the work of a candidate who could replace either of them.
The picture on the label of the Wild Turkey Bourbon bottle is not even a good picture of a tame turkey. The corporation distills a great whiskey, and I have drunk rather a lot of it, but when it comes to the painting of the turkey they are using in their advertisements, as well as on the label of the bottle itself, they really ought to lean back and take another look at their hole card. Whiskey of the grade and quality bottled by that distillery simply deserves a better picture.
I don’t know why things came out this way, but they have. And while there are thousands of people who are talented painters and thousands of people who know what a wild turkey looks like, until now, with the two exceptions noted, nobody has managed to get both qualities in the same person.
It was said of the Russian Prima Ballerina, Galina Ulanova, that she even moved gracefully when she was in the bathroom throwing up. A wild turkey always exhibits the same appearance of graceful movement, and nobody but Ned Smith and William Harris have actually caught that grace.
William’s backgrounds were not all that good; some of them in fact approached the primitive. I once toyed with the idea of taking one of William’s turkey paintings and having somebody do a background around it. I was informed that only an intellectual barbarian could even entertain such a thought, and that William, who was particularly touchy about such things, might have taken me behind his store and opened up a 20-pound can of whip ass.
Ned’s backgrounds on the other hand, are great, and in all other matters of turkey aspect, color, shape and fluid motion temporarily at rest, he is right in the middle of the 10 ring every time.
Artistically, we need to find some talented painter, give him an extensive exposure to turkeys in a variety of situations — turkeys walking, turkeys flowing over the landscape, turkeys flying through the tops of second-growth hardwood at 50 miles an hour — and convince him to quit looking at melted watches for artistic inspiration and start paying attention to something of importance.
There is precedence for such actions. Cuz Strickland, with Mossy Oak, who has a lifetime of experience in dealing with such people, tells me that in order to get a decent turkey photographer you have to take a turkey hunter and turn him into a cameraman. Professional cameramen, according to Cuz, are always named either Claude or Pierre, weigh 110 pounds, sniff a good deal, are uncomfortable around guns, and say, “Oh you,” a lot.
I suspect that may be the trouble with most artists.
Sometimes, in order to get things right, you have to take the solution and work backwards to fix the problem.
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