The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“TRIBUTE TO JIM HAUTMAN” mentioning the Department of Interior was published in the Senate section on pages S16832-S16834 on Nov. 8, 1995.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
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:
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. 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.
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