[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 176 (Wednesday, November 8, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S16832-S16834]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                         TRIBUTE TO JIM HAUTMAN

 Mr. GRAMS. Mr. President, I want to take this opportunity to 
congratulate a fellow Minnesotan, Jim Hautman of Plymouth, MN, on 
submitting the winning entry for the 1994-95 Federal Duck Stamp Design 
Competition.
  What is particularly impressive about the selection of Mr. Hautman's 
entry as the winner of this year's Federal duck stamp competition is 
that this is the second time he has won the contest, having also 
produced the winning entry in 1989. In fact, the Hautman family has a 
history of submitting winning entries into the competition. Brother Joe 
Hautman's entry won the competition in 1991, while brother Bob Hautman 
won a second place award in 1994.
  Each year, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service sponsors the duck stamp 
design competition to determine the final design of the following 
year's stamp. The artwork is judged by a panel of art, waterfowl, and 
stamp experts who must select the winning design from up to 1,000 
entries.
  The contest is the only annual art competition sponsored by the 
Federal Government, with the winning entry released for sale to 
sportsmen and women and stamp collectors each June 30. The revenues 
generated by the sales of each year's winning entry are used by the 
Federal Government to buy or lease habitat lands for migratory 
waterfowl species.
  Since the Federal Duck Stamp Design Program was first initiated in 
1934, Minnesota has produced nine winners of the annual competition, 
more than any other State. As this year's winner, Mr. Hautman not only 
continues this impressive tradition of competition winners from 
Minnesota, but also a tradition of producing winning entries within his 
own immediate family. For the Record I am pleased to submit yesterday's 
Washington Post article on the Hautman family's legendary success in 
the duck stamp contest.
  Mr. President, as a Senator representing a State which has a proud 
history of maintaining and providing waterfowl and wildlife habitat, I 
want to again congratulate Mr. Hautman on winning this prestigious 
contest for the second time and also recognize and laud the 
achievements of the Federal Duck Stamp Program in providing habitat for 
migratory waterfowl species.
  The article follows:

                [From The Washington Post, Nov. 7, 1995]

 Quackerjack Artists; For the Stamp Contest, the Hautman Brothers Have 
                          Their Ducks in a Row

                          (By William Souder)

       Plymouth, Minn.--The ducks have pretty much taken over Bob 
     Hautman's house. There are loaded decoy bags in the middle of 
     the living room floor, and loose decoys--fat bluebills and 
     graceful canvasbacks--are scattered about seemingly 
     everywhere. Stuffed ducks, locked in perpetual flight, rest 
     on shelves that are a few weeks between dustings. Out on the 
     driveway a dun-painted duck boat sits on a trailer hooked up 
     to Hautman's car, which is pointed toward the street for an 
     easy pre-dawn exit.
       ``Fixing these guys up,'' Hautman says, turning over a 
     freshly spray-painted bluebill decoy. He is tall and thin, 
     dressed in jeans and a zippered camouflage sweat shirt. The 
     decoy he is holding is a gamy smudge of black and light gray. 
     ``I was out hunting today, and I thought they looked pretty 
     beat up. I am going out again in the morning.''
       For Hautman, 36, it is another autumn, another duck season, 
     another chance at waterfowling immortality. He interrupts his 
     hunting this week to come to Washington for the annual 
     federal duck stamp competition--far and away the most 
     prestigious honor in wildlife painting and surely one of the 
     richest art prizes in the world. Hautman is one of 453 
     wildlife artists from around the country who submitted 
     entries in September, and while many of the others will be 
     too nervous to attend the judging today and tomorrow [see 
     related article, Page E6], Hautman will be right there in the 
     audience waiting to see if his 7-by-10-inch painting will 
     become next year's stamp.
       And why not? After all, he finished second in last year's 
     contest and came in fourth the three years prior to that. 
     Plus, he is a Hautman--a member of America's ruling duck 
     stamp dynasty--and he is due.
       The current $15 duck stamp--the one riding around on the 
     backs of more than 1 million hunting licenses--was engraved 
     from a painting of a pair of mallards submitted last year by 
     Hautman's younger brother Jim. That made two wins for Jim, 
     who at the age of 25 had become the youngest winner ever with 
     a painting of black-bellied whistling ducks that appeared on 
     the 1990 stamp. Jim got married earlier this year and moved 
     out of the house on the hill in Plymouth, but he still has 
     studio space there in a cluttered bedroom down the hall from 
     Bob's. Because artists cannot enter the contest for 3 years 
     after a win, Bob will not be competing against Jim this week.
       But then there is Joe, another Hautman brother, who is back 
     in the hunt this year after winning in 1992 with a spectacled 
     eider. 

[[Page S 16833]]
     Joe, 39, lives in Jackson, N.J., and has a PhD in physics. He gave up 
     science after doing postdoctoral research at the University 
     of Pennsylvania so he could become a full-time wildlife 
     artist, too. Jim and Joe are the only brothers ever to win 
     the federal competition. Joe's submission this year is a 
     Barrow's goldeneye, one of the four ducks the U.S. Fish and 
     Wildlife Service has solicited for the 1996 stamp. Bob, the 
     shyest of the three brothers and the one most anxious about 
     the competition, would not say which bird he painted for the 
     contest.
       If Joe were to win again, Bob would at least get a chance 
     every other wildlife artist in the country covets, the chance 
     to compete next year without going up against a Hautman.
       ``We do get calls every year from artists wanting to know 
     if the Hautmans are going to be in the contest,'' says Terry 
     Bell, special events coordinator for the Federal Duck Stamp 
     Program. ``They are all a little intimidated.''


                            The Duck Market

       Duck stamp painting is a high-stakes subspecies of wildlife 
     art--itself a genre held in low regard by the fine-art world 
     but adored by millions of sportsmen and collectors. The stamp 
     paintings are intensely realistic--anatomical correctness is 
     required of every entry--but the rewards of winning a stamp 
     competition are decidedly unreal. Officially, the Federal 
     Duck Stamp Program offers the winner only a sheet of stamps 
     and a handshake from the secretary of the interior. But there 
     is a thriving private-sector market for limited-edition 
     prints of the winning painting.
       That market peaked in the mid-1980s, when winners of the 
     federal competition could count on making a minimum of $1 
     million in fees and royalties from their prints, not to 
     mention the overnight increase in the value of their other 
     works. For a variety of reasons--including large print runs 
     that glutted the market, careless investments by speculators, 
     and a continuing decline in the number of duck hunters--the 
     payoff for winning the federal contest is not what it used to 
     be, though it remains enormous. This year's winner can expect 
     to earn somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million.
       ``When you win, the phone does not stop ringing for days,'' 
     says David Maass, another Minnesota artist who's won the 
     federal competition.
       ``This is the Olympics of wildlife art,'' says Robert 
     Lesino, chief of the Federal Duck Stamp Program. ``No other 
     event in the life of an artist can launch a career like this 
     can. When you win the federal duck stamp, everything 
     changes.''


                         Shooting and Sketching

       ``I never really thought the boys showed that much artistic 
     talent,'' says Elaine Hautman of her sons. ``They always had 
     their crayons, and they could always draw nicely. I guess 
     other people thought that was unusual, but to us it was just 
     sort of normal.''
       Hautman, who worked in the 1940s as a commercial artist in 
     Minneapolis and who remains a sharp-eyed critic of her sons' 
     work, says they got their love of the outdoors from her late 
     husband, Tom, who took them hunting and taught them how to 
     look at game in its natural environment. ``I think by the 
     time they could talk they could already tell one bird from 
     another,'' she says.
       Joe Hautman says that he, Jim and Bob have never thought of 
     themselves as being unique.
       ``It seems sort of natural to us,'' he says. ``There are 
     seven kids in the family, so it is not like we are all into 
     this. The three of us have always done art, and I do not 
     think we tend to see ourselves in the same way others see us. 
     I guess it is like the way people in the same family 
     sometimes do not think they look like each other when in fact 
     they do.
       ``The three of us just got back from a long hunting trip in 
     Minnesota and Manitoba, and in two weeks we did not talk 
     about art at all.''
       It is one thing to be a genetically predisposed wildlife 
     artist. It is another thing altogether to set out 
     purposefully to win duck stamp competitions. Besides the 
     federal stamps they've illustrated, the brothers Hautman have 
     collectively won 15 State duck or pheasant stamp 
     competitions, and Jim has won the Australian national 
     contest. No wonder other artists are spooked. The Hautmans 
     are not prolific--none of them produces more than a dozen 
     paintings a year, and they publish only a fraction of their 
     output for collectors--but when a bird flies off one of their 
     easels there's a very good chance it will land on a hunting 
     stamp.
       Everyone into duck art recognizes that the Hautmans share 
     an uncommon natural talent, just as they recognize the 
     brothers' distinctive style--the strong lighting, the stark 
     contrasts so well suited to the engraving process, the 
     meticulous anatomical perfection. But what seems to have 
     really separated them from other artists is their single-
     mindedness.
       ``More than any other wildlife artists I know, they are 
     students of duck stamp design,'' says Frank J. Sisser, editor 
     and publisher of U.S. Art magazine in Minneapolis and one of 
     the five judges for the 1992 competition. ``They study what's 
     been successful. And they make no bones about painting 
     primarily for stamp competitions. They are not as distracted 
     by other projects as many artists are.
       ``But they are also brothers and best friends who serve as 
     each other's harshest critics. If they can survive having 
     their paintings inspected by one another, they are going to 
     have a very good chance at winning.''
       The Hautmans have traveled to Kodiak Island to observe and 
     shoot species found only near the Bering Sea. They have 
     hunted snow geese and the ubiquitous mallard in the marshes 
     of Manitoba, Canada. They always hunt in Minnesota, and Bob 
     says he wouldn't mind getting down to Texas sometime to look 
     for the little-seen mottled duck, a brown-on-brown bird 
     similar in appearance to a hen mallard and one of the four 
     North American ducks that has never been on the Federal 
     stamp.
       When the brothers failed to bag a rare spectacled eider in 
     Alaska a few years ago, Joe's research for his winning 
     painting took him to the Philadelphia Zoo, which had a live 
     hen, and to a natural history museum up in Ottawa, which had 
     a collection of dead eiders that had been shot by Eskimos 
     early in this century.
       ``I thought they would be mounted,'' says Joe, ``but they 
     were just in drawers, kind of laid out flat. The museum let 
     me examine them, and I made a lot of photographs and 
     sketches.''
       Whenever they can, the Hautmans shoot their own specimens 
     and have them mounted, to study and work from over time. 
     ``You can bend them into whatever pose you want if you work 
     on them when they are still wet from the taxidermist,'' says 
     Jim.
       Of course, they do not always have to go so far to find 
     them, either. Minnesota lies between two major migratory 
     routes--the Mississippi Flyway on the east side of the State 
     and the Central Flyway on the west. Every fall a great 
     southward movement of birds that breed all the way up to the 
     Arctic Circle sweeps down across Minnesota--thousands of 
     geese and ducks and swans in an immense, colorful profusion. 
     Minnesota is duck country, and, in a way, the capital of 
     American duck culture. Nine Minnesotans, more than from any 
     other State, have won the Federal duck stamp competition, and 
     several of them--including Jim Hautman, David Maass and the 
     legendary Les Kouba--have won twice.
       The process is meticulous. Bob Hautman says finding the 
     right image involves many false starts and dead ends as he 
     makes preliminary sketches.
       ``I am trying to find an effect that will make the painting 
     alive as opposed to lifelike,'' he says. ``A photograph looks 
     realistic, but frozen. But with a painting, when you look at 
     it you should see something that looks living.
       ``Surprisingly, the background is often the hardest part. 
     Sometimes it takes weeks. Sometimes it takes months.''
       Robert Lesino thinks the Hautmans' methodical approach is 
     not typical of many wildlife artists.
       ``A lot of the guys who enter the stamp competition wait 
     until the last minute and then hurry the painting to get it 
     in on time,'' Lesino says. ``The Hautmans start a year ahead 
     of time. They just put in more effort than other people do.''
       ``I start thinking about the next painting right after the 
     contest,'' says Jim. ``I am a slow painter. It takes me a 
     long time.''


                              The Paradox

       The results of those long labors are breathtakingly 
     beautiful to duck aficionados and more or less a complete 
     mystery to everyone else. Despite the insistent realism, duck 
     art is variable in its effect. Some stamp images die in front 
     of your eyes--they're accurate but cataleptic. Others are 
     quite arresting. Dan Smith, another Minnesota painter, won 
     the Federal contest in 1988 with a moody, suggestive image of 
     a lone snow goose winging along a foggy lake shore at dawn. 
     The painting was a marvel of depth and technical wizardry. 
     Smith said at the time that painting a snow goose--which is 
     basically a white oval with wings--was ``like trying to paint 
     an egg.''
       To non-hunters, duck art is contradictory all the way 
     around--an art with no aesthetic. Why shoot a duck so you can 
     paint it to raise money for habitat for more ducks to shoot? 
     The answer, for painters from John James Audubon to the 
     Hautman brothers, is ineffable, but the fundamental 
     assumption--that hunting is heartless and hunters are 
     unfeeling--is problematic. The truth is that hunters are 
     hopeless sentimentalists, filled with nostalgic longing for 
     days spent in frigid sloughs under steely skies. They are 
     touched to the core by images of birds on the wing in 
     blustery weather.
       ``Some people just cannot relate to duck hunting or to duck 
     hunters,'' says Bob Hautman. ``I understand that. Sometimes 
     when you are out there in a boat in a swamp wringing a duck's 
     neck, I guess you might think to yourself that it is kind of 
     a tough sport. But it is where I start. Wildlife artists are 
     generally hunters first.''
       Randy Eggenberger, president of Wild Wings, a leading 
     wildlife art publisher based in Lake City, Minn., which has 
     handled the Hautmans' work for 10 years, thinks wildlife art 
     is simply democratic art.
       ``These are paintings that appeal to the masses,'' he says. 
     ``And that is what I think art should be about--creating 
     something that Joe Blow can hang on his wall and enjoy.''
       Jim Hautman says whatever it is about duck painting that 
     people like cannot really be analyzed.
       ``I guess hunting is a paradox to many people,'' he says. 
     ``And what I do is hard to explain. All I can say is that if 
     I did not love ducks, I wouldn't hunt them.''
     
[[Page S 16834]]



                      Duck Tale: Birth of a STAMP

       The Federal Duck Stamp Program was created by Congress in 
     1934 to raise revenue to purchase and manage waterfowl 
     habitat within the National Wildlife Refuge System. The first 
     stamps, which cost $1, were painted by artists commissioned 
     by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Since 1949 the image 
     engraved on the stamp, which now costs $15, has been chosen 
     in an annual open competition. It is the only art competition 
     officially sponsored by the Federal Government, and one of 
     the longest-running and most successful conservation programs 
     in the country. Ninety-eight percent of the revenue from duck 
     stamp sales goes directly to purchase wetlands. Since its 
     inception, the program has generated half a billion dollars 
     in revenue and added more than 4 million acres of wetlands to 
     the refuge system.
       Federal duck stamps are required on all duck hunting 
     licenses in the United States, and hunters will purchase 
     about 90 percent of roughly 1.5 million stamps that will be 
     sold this year. The remainder are bought by conservationists 
     and stamp collectors.
       This year's competition opened yesterday, in the auditorium 
     at the Department of the Interior building at 18th and C 
     streets NW, when all 453 entries went on display. Judging 
     begins today, from 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with an initial 
     in-or-out elimination round that will winnow the entries down 
     to 50 or so paintings. Tomorrow, judges will score the 
     paintings, with announcement of a winner expected around 
     noon. All sessions are free and open to the public.
       The identity of the five judges, who are picked from all 
     over the country each year, is kept secret before the 
     competition. However, program chief Robert Lesino confirms 
     that one judge this year will be Jane Alexander, chairman of 
     the National Endowment for the Arts.
       The Fish and Wildlife Service limits the competition in 
     alternating years to those ducks that have never appeared on 
     the Federal stamp--the so-called ``ugly ducks.'' This is an 
     ugly duck year, with the black scoter, surf scoter, Barrow's 
     goldeneye and mottled duck to choose from.

                          ____________________