Speaker 1: This is the me Eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear listeningcast.
Speaker 2: You can't predict anything.
Speaker 1: The Meat Eater Podcast is brought to you by First Light.
Speaker 1: Whether you're checking trail cams, hanging deer stands, or scouting
Speaker 1: for ELK. First Light has performance apparel to support every
Speaker 1: hunter in every environment. Check it out at first light
Speaker 1: dot com. F I R S T L I t
Speaker 1: E dot com. Hey guys, before you listen to this
Speaker 1: show that you're listening to right now, I want to
Speaker 1: plug something you're going to be listening to at the
Speaker 1: end of the show. Our buddy Jason Phelps has a podcast,
Speaker 1: Cutting the Distance, of course, and he was recently on
Speaker 1: an ELK hunt with country music singer Luke Colmbs down
Speaker 1: in New Mexico and they sat down and did an
Speaker 1: episode of Cutting the Distance together. So we're gonna put
Speaker 1: a little snippet of that here because it's great, And
Speaker 1: then you can go over and listen to the rest
Speaker 1: and check out Cutting the Distance and subscribe to the
Speaker 1: Cutting the Distance podcast. Thank you. Phil's here all riled up.
Speaker 1: I knew you were gonna do this. All pissy, not
Speaker 1: even gonna get into that good. That was pissy. It
Speaker 1: can feel Can you see this? Yeah? Should I hold it?
Speaker 1: The big thing or this thing?
Speaker 3: You can do both, Okay, the big thing would be nicer.
Speaker 1: Okay. It's the time of year. Well, I don't want
Speaker 1: people to lose sight of what we're doing here. It's
Speaker 1: the time of year when you go you're like, oh shit,
Speaker 1: I gotta buy my duck stamp. Great, and this is
Speaker 1: not a lie. I just got mine today. Oh, this
Speaker 1: is not a lie.
Speaker 4: They're in stock now, great.
Speaker 5: Where'd you go post office?
Speaker 1: My desk? I had some great I have performula.
Speaker 6: I'll have to do that.
Speaker 5: Hopefully a couple end up.
Speaker 1: One time and Kylie grab something I needed to and uh,
Speaker 1: for just it's a long story. It's time of year
Speaker 1: and you gotta go buy your duck stamp. You know
Speaker 1: we're gonna do this out talking about the movie Fargo.
Speaker 1: No one ever does. They can't. They never do it
Speaker 1: without talking about Fargo. You people have seen Fargoll know
Speaker 1: what I'm getting at. It's time of year and you
Speaker 1: gotta go buy your duck stamp. And we have extremely
Speaker 1: special guests. We have the person that paint in the
Speaker 1: damn duck stamp, the most prestigious.
Speaker 3: It's gotta be right, that's what they say.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna ask someone who's not you. I'm gonna ask
Speaker 1: another painter. We also have I'm like, there's so much
Speaker 1: going on with the show, it's complicated. We also have
Speaker 1: the junior duck stamp winter joining from South Korea where
Speaker 1: it's one am. So I'm trying to be aware of
Speaker 1: her time. She's good for a minute. Yeah, okay, so
Speaker 1: we're good, all right, Kelsey Kelsey. We had Kelsey Morris
Speaker 1: come in. She's up normally No, no discredit, Chuck, She's
Speaker 1: normally our She's like the resident wildlife artist. Yeah, painter,
Speaker 1: she's the resident painter. Is is just how prestigious is it?
Speaker 1: You don't paint ducks?
Speaker 6: No, But I'm aware. It's the highest honor.
Speaker 1: It's the highest honor in waterfowl, yes, painting.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's the pinnacle. You know, that's what people we
Speaker 6: were talking about this earlier. People strive their entire careers,
Speaker 6: year on year to win the duck stamp.
Speaker 1: So it's like like in Fargo.
Speaker 6: Said, yeah, but yeah, it's it's a high honor. It's
Speaker 6: the pinnacle. Of the Duck Stamp career, you know, to
Speaker 6: win the Ducks Stamp.
Speaker 1: So and uh, this year is Montanan Chuck black one
Speaker 1: from right Local?
Speaker 3: Yeah, Belgrade.
Speaker 1: How many times you submitted?
Speaker 3: This is my tenth time?
Speaker 1: So has anyone ever won it twice? Do you call
Speaker 1: it winning it? What do you call it? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Went winning it? Yeah?
Speaker 7: No, the there's three brothers from Minnesota. A couple of
Speaker 7: people now I think have won it twice. But the
Speaker 7: three brothers the hot means, which is what they referenced
Speaker 7: in Fargo, which is funny how old that movie is.
Speaker 7: And they were winning back then. I think combined between
Speaker 7: the three, they're at fifteen now are they still?
Speaker 3: Yeah? They won the last two years?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 7: Yeah, so this was my year because when you win,
Speaker 7: you have to sit out for three Oh it's like real.
Speaker 1: So they won, it's like drawn.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so they won the last two years and I
Speaker 7: was like, this is my year.
Speaker 3: I got to get in while they're out.
Speaker 1: God, no, kid, we're gonna talk about that whole We're
Speaker 1: gonna talk about that whole world. Max Bart is here
Speaker 1: just because he likes to hunt ducks lot, and you've
Speaker 1: bought many a ducks.
Speaker 5: Down many, but I haven't bought mine this year, so
Speaker 5: this is a good reminder.
Speaker 1: I keep buying more than I need on an accident,
Speaker 1: because every year I forget that my kids don't need them,
Speaker 1: but I buy them for my little kids and then
Speaker 1: I later realized they didn't need them.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I typically buy at least three a year, one for me,
Speaker 5: one for my dog, and then like maybe a couple
Speaker 5: spares just in case if someone doesn't have them.
Speaker 6: It's a good thing to buy an access Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because all the money goes to Wetlands Conservation.
Speaker 3: So giving back a little bit.
Speaker 1: Brent Reeves is here fresh from the squirrel Cookoff, little
Speaker 1: as a tick. I was telling Brent my body the
Speaker 1: I have a trapper buddy who I was talking to
Speaker 1: him about binoculars yesterday, and he just mentioned casually in
Speaker 1: passing he just got back from seeing Brent Reeves at
Speaker 1: the squirrel cookoff, as though that's like a thing to
Speaker 1: go do. Oh man.
Speaker 8: Apparently a lot of people thought that there was thousands
Speaker 8: of people there. It was good. Yeah, it was forty
Speaker 8: teams every year. They limited to forty and then they
Speaker 8: come in with their recipe their squirrels. If they don't
Speaker 8: have squirrel was that supply for them there? It's all free.
Speaker 8: It's a good family deal. It was just it's it's
Speaker 8: just a great event.
Speaker 1: What kind of loser would go to a squirrel cookoff
Speaker 1: without squirrels?
Speaker 8: Well, I mean there's a team there from Alaska last year.
Speaker 1: It should have a bunch of pine squirrels.
Speaker 8: Well, gray squirrels and fox squirrels. That's what it's. That's
Speaker 8: what you're limited to cook it's resident there of Arkansas.
Speaker 8: And if you don't have them, the folks, the good folks.
Speaker 1: There natural state. I mean the hack right out of
Speaker 1: the gate like that. You know, I don't know, that's cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And you said, Phil, I'm glad they got those. I'm
Speaker 1: glad they got squirrels there. Yeah, they're share with everybody.
Speaker 1: Watch just Chuck Black. You know how you won the
Speaker 1: duck stamp contest, Well, people could win the Arizona raffle.
Speaker 3: There you go.
Speaker 1: You like that little transition they teach that painter school.
Speaker 3: Do they know.
Speaker 1: We've been talking a bunch about in Arizona, like way
Speaker 1: too talked about it, way too much about Arizona's boarded
Speaker 1: uh Commission, Wildlife Commission, their decision to eliminate governor's tag auctions.
Speaker 1: So their decisions, their decision to move away from allocating
Speaker 1: some number of big game tags to the highest bidder
Speaker 1: and instead moving those tags to raffle systems where everybody
Speaker 1: can have a chance to win rather than just the
Speaker 1: highest bidder. As we've explored to the point of nausea,
Speaker 1: there are trade offs. There are trade offfs because all
Speaker 1: of that money watch this transition, like the duck stamp,
Speaker 1: all of that auction money goes to support wildlife habitat.
Speaker 1: And so they're faced with making this decision to move
Speaker 1: into a more democratic system of allocation raffles. There's a
Speaker 1: there's probably a there's a likely scenario where there's a
Speaker 1: forfeiture of a lot of conservation money. But you can
Speaker 1: remedy that. You can help remedy that that discrepancy if
Speaker 1: you go right now and buy some raffle tickets for
Speaker 1: Arizona big game raffles. They got this a bunch of them.
Speaker 1: There's a Mountain Lion raffle, COO's dear elk mule deer,
Speaker 1: all kinds of raffles. I blue, not blue, invested, not blue.
Speaker 1: That's it. Listen, I didn't say that. Come out, Phil,
Speaker 1: Can you play it back or I say invested.
Speaker 3: Maybe if you didn't call me pissy at the tip of.
Speaker 1: Okay, September one, twenty twenty four to December fifteenth, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty four, so we are well into the raffle period.
Speaker 1: You can enter to win all kinds of gear packages,
Speaker 1: but you can also enter to win big game tags.
Speaker 1: I went on the other day and spent I bought
Speaker 1: ten mule Deer raffle tags. So I invested a hundred
Speaker 1: bucks into my mule deer hunt and hopefully they will
Speaker 1: do such good business on these raffles of just people
Speaker 1: thrown in ten bucks a pop here and there to
Speaker 1: help make up for what could wind up being a
Speaker 1: net conservation loss. Am I saying this too strongly? No
Speaker 1: a net conservation loss by moving away from Governor's tags.
Speaker 1: They had their logic to the decision. If you're curious
Speaker 1: about that logic, go back and listen to every other
Speaker 1: podcast we've made lately.
Speaker 4: Oh and you can you can purchase now until ending
Speaker 4: at nine pm Arizona time on December fifteenth.
Speaker 1: But now that I bought my ten, I don't want
Speaker 1: any whoever goes on there. Don't do the mule deer one.
Speaker 1: I'm hoping I'm the only one that did meal deer
Speaker 1: and I win that thing. Good luck, So you're not
Speaker 1: going to be the only one. No, I always I
Speaker 1: always buy into these raffles. You know, I haven't bought
Speaker 1: into Arizona, but I'm buying an Arizona. Whenever they have
Speaker 1: a Montana Raffler or Alaska raffle, I always buy in.
Speaker 4: And there are all kinds of other prizes, and then
Speaker 4: like the more you buy their discounts. I mean they've
Speaker 4: set it up in a great way.
Speaker 1: So yep, uh okay, we got a new folks, I'll
Speaker 1: check this out. We got a new collab ammal we've
Speaker 1: worked on with our buddies at sig Sour and we
Speaker 1: have a new bonded lead ammal which is out now
Speaker 1: and you can go check it out. I'm packing right
Speaker 1: now to go moose hunting. I'm not I'm not personally
Speaker 1: moose hunting this year, but uh, my buddies are moose hunting.
Speaker 1: I'm going with them. I'm just my job is to
Speaker 1: call and observe and this is what we're shooting on moose,
Speaker 1: and this is what I've been shooting on moose because
Speaker 1: it's loaded with a nozzler ACI Bond bullet, which you
Speaker 1: know they fly superbly well and are very very good
Speaker 1: on big game. So it is a lead ammal if
Speaker 1: you're hunting an area where you're not supposed to use lead,
Speaker 1: if you're in the Condor Recovery area or whatever areas
Speaker 1: of California, not for you. Stick to all copper in
Speaker 1: those places. But when you want a really high performance bullet,
Speaker 1: check out the new Platinum Hunter line that we have
Speaker 1: out from SIG. It is phenomenal stuff. Anyone knows who's
Speaker 1: ever shot Acubonds knows. Just for performance, it's great. Again,
Speaker 1: not appropriate for your non toxic areas, but when you
Speaker 1: got a big hunt and you're really counting on it,
Speaker 1: check it out. Uh Okay, we're gonna go to Danielle. Now, oh,
Speaker 1: there she is, Danielle. What's up?
Speaker 2: Hi?
Speaker 1: Who've killed that lion?
Speaker 9: In the background, I'm in my son's nursery.
Speaker 5: I know.
Speaker 9: Yeah, So I had a broadcast on Friday in my
Speaker 9: office and the the Wi Fi was terrible in the
Speaker 9: Wi Fi boxes right next to his nursery. So that's
Speaker 9: why I'm in here.
Speaker 1: But there's still a line in the background.
Speaker 9: Yeah. Yeah, it's right above his changing table. Yeah.
Speaker 1: When way he feels nice and safe when he's get change.
Speaker 9: Well, you know, Travis said, you can do whatever you
Speaker 9: want with the nursery as long as the cat stays
Speaker 9: in there, because it used to be his office.
Speaker 1: And so, yes, Danielle is in a nursery. Behind her
Speaker 1: is her changing table and perched over it as a
Speaker 1: stuffed mountain lion, like he's waiting for the baby to
Speaker 1: show up so he can nail it. Danielle's got brand new,
Speaker 1: brand new cookbook out, Wild in the Whole seasonal recipes
Speaker 1: for the just cook Danielle phenomenal cook. Tell us about
Speaker 1: the book, man. First off, wy could folks find it?
Speaker 9: October eighth is the pub date, so right around the corner.
Speaker 9: I don't know when this podcast is being released, but
Speaker 9: October eighth, it's coming out wherever books are sold.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 9: And so this is a project I've been working on,
Speaker 9: I want to say, for about three or four years.
Speaker 1: It's really beautiful. It's really beautiful.
Speaker 9: Thank you. Yes, I spent a long long time thinking
Speaker 9: about it. I had some A couple of publishers reached
Speaker 9: out to me a few years ago asking for me
Speaker 9: to do a cookbook, And so once I started to
Speaker 9: think about what I wanted to do and really like
Speaker 9: what's missing in the market of cookbooks, I kind of
Speaker 9: came to the realization that one, I wanted to do
Speaker 9: something that represented me and the way that I live
Speaker 9: and that lifestyle and type of cooking that I do.
Speaker 9: But two, all wild Game cookbooks are are just that,
Speaker 9: they're just all wild game, and so I really wanted
Speaker 9: to have something else besides just that, Like what else
Speaker 9: are you eating with the protein? Like what are the
Speaker 9: other foods on your plate? So that's kind of how
Speaker 9: the book got started. And it's organized through this season,
Speaker 9: so unlike other books which are normally like categorized on
Speaker 9: big game, small game, or or however, this is organized
Speaker 9: through this seasons, which I think is pretty exciting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you, I don't. You're the main if I go
Speaker 1: to get a recipe somewhere, You're the main place I
Speaker 1: would go to get a recipe.
Speaker 3: You're nice.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're mostly the only person who's like actual recipes
Speaker 1: I follow. Really, I make a lot of stuff without
Speaker 1: really paying attention to what I'm making, But yeah, I
Speaker 1: wind up having a lot of your food, and then
Speaker 1: I like specifically make your recipes. I like your recipes
Speaker 1: that much.
Speaker 9: Well, that is that's a big compliment. I appreciate it.
Speaker 9: I think, you know, I think what I try to
Speaker 9: do with recipes is just like, well, there's a lot
Speaker 9: of things that I think about when I think about
Speaker 9: recipe development in general, but for people who are cooking
Speaker 9: at home, it's kind of like making sure that the
Speaker 9: recipe is something that's achievable, attainable, but he's practical in
Speaker 9: a way that you would actually cook at home. I
Speaker 9: think a lot of recipes like really kind of want
Speaker 9: you to like grab a bunch of stuff and like
Speaker 9: get your whole kitchen dirty, and so I try to
Speaker 9: be really conscious of like the way that you're actually
Speaker 9: cooking at home, and like, especially now that I have
Speaker 9: a baby, I'm like, how can I do this with
Speaker 9: less dishes? I haven't always thought that way, but I
Speaker 9: think that way now for sure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, tell me about the cover because it's kind of
Speaker 1: a bold These are pheasants on the cover.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I actually have the book.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm holding it. It's a little bit of a
Speaker 1: bold cover because on the cover are some pheasants, which
Speaker 1: are beautiful, but you opted to have the feet stuck
Speaker 1: on there still, ye did anybody did anybody in cookbook
Speaker 1: try to warn you off that, like it was like
Speaker 1: too too much?
Speaker 9: No, so they were very adamant that, you know, the
Speaker 9: cover of the book has to be something that says
Speaker 9: wild food and.
Speaker 1: A bird's foot.
Speaker 9: Well, you know, I actually posted a video of duck
Speaker 9: cooking dove on social media, and it's really kind of
Speaker 9: funny because people get real offended by looking at bird feet.
Speaker 1: It looked like a lame ass book otherwise, but it's
Speaker 1: like too beautifully pheasant, not lame. But it wouldn't be
Speaker 1: like I wouldn't look, and I would look and i'd
Speaker 1: see like I don't know, I'd be like, oh, chickens
Speaker 1: or something. I don't have the hell i'd think, but
Speaker 1: your look.
Speaker 9: That's part of the reason why I kept it on,
Speaker 9: is like you can see the it's a rooster, you know,
Speaker 9: it's not a farm raised pheasant. But anyway, so yeah,
Speaker 9: it's got.
Speaker 1: Big old spurs. No, it's not aggressive, and I didn't
Speaker 1: mean to be lame. It's a beautiful book people picture,
Speaker 1: but like it's kind of just comes right out and
Speaker 1: says something to you know, with those trust pheasants with
Speaker 1: their their feet on there, it's it's it's.
Speaker 9: Very it's yeah, there was a there was a topic
Speaker 9: of debate, and I'm very surprised that Penguin Random House
Speaker 9: they were all on board with it. I thought they
Speaker 9: were going to kind of have an issue with it
Speaker 9: of like, oh, no, this is really going to scare
Speaker 9: people off. But I think it also because of the
Speaker 9: way that it's styled. It looks more elegant, and I
Speaker 9: think it's you know, it's really common, especially in Europe,
Speaker 9: like people aren't afraid of seen feet on a bird.
Speaker 9: I think it's just an American thing that people get
Speaker 9: freaked out because, you know, people don't want to be
Speaker 9: reminded that this was once an animal. They want to like,
Speaker 9: they want to have the departure between the living thing
Speaker 9: and then the thing that you're eating. So keeping that
Speaker 9: feet the feet attached really just gets under people's skin.
Speaker 9: And I think that might be one of the reasons
Speaker 9: why I kept the feet on for this photo is
Speaker 9: because that's kind of a big part of what this
Speaker 9: book is about, is you know, understanding and knowing where
Speaker 9: your food comes from.
Speaker 1: Uh, you said it was seasonally. It's like organized seasonally.
Speaker 1: But how many recipes are in here altogether?
Speaker 9: Oh, I don't know. I don't know. It's kind of well,
Speaker 9: you know, I started this, I had to cut a
Speaker 9: lot of stuff, so I don't remember how many actually
Speaker 9: made it. Over eighty I know that's that's like the
Speaker 9: ad Hier eighty And I guess it depends on what
Speaker 9: you consider recipe when you start getting into the back
Speaker 9: of it, where you've got like, you know, spice rubs
Speaker 9: and all those other kind of add on things in
Speaker 9: the back.
Speaker 6: I love the the like I'm just looking at one here,
Speaker 6: like turkey with morels and asparagus. That's all the things
Speaker 6: we would have at that time. And to have a
Speaker 6: recipe that you can you just have these because you've
Speaker 6: been out in the woods and you have your turkey
Speaker 6: and you found some morels and you got asparagus in
Speaker 6: your yard. Like here's your meal.
Speaker 3: That's awesome.
Speaker 10: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 9: I think that was important to me because I think
Speaker 9: anybody who spends a lot of time in the outdoors
Speaker 9: can relate to the ebbs and flows of each season.
Speaker 9: And I wanted people to pick up a season and
Speaker 9: get really excited about what you can find outdoors, because
Speaker 9: a lot of times you kind of just pick a
Speaker 9: recipe from from like whatever whatever you want to eat
Speaker 9: at any time of the year. But as somebody who
Speaker 9: cooks a lot, I know that tomatoes are really only
Speaker 9: good in the summer, and so I think I think
Speaker 9: that wasn't A really important part is to sort of
Speaker 9: embrace this idea of living in the moment, because every
Speaker 9: season offers something really special and it's something to get
Speaker 9: excited about. So I try to do a lot of
Speaker 9: storytelling in this book, and each season, you know, like
Speaker 9: there's just always something to just really love, whether it's
Speaker 9: the waterfowl migration in the in the winter or yeah,
Speaker 9: like turkeys and morals in the spring, there's always something.
Speaker 1: Well, congratulations, man, it's gorgeous.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 1: When I yeah, it's very beautiful. It's it's a really
Speaker 1: elegant and nice, really nice thanks, thank you. So everybody
Speaker 1: check that out. Me Eaters, Wild and Whole Seasonal Recipes
Speaker 1: for the Conscious Cook. Danielle Prue. This is your first book, Danielle.
Speaker 1: It is, Yeah, so this is all the like, this
Speaker 1: is all the recipes that really have a lifetime of
Speaker 1: creation into him.
Speaker 9: Yeah, there's a handful of them that are like the
Speaker 9: tried and true recipes that I cook all the time
Speaker 9: that I was excited to put in there, and then
Speaker 9: of course there's tons of new things. But yeah, the
Speaker 9: first book, it's definitely kind of like my baby, sure.
Speaker 1: Man, because it winds up being all your like mega favorites,
Speaker 1: going to going to a first project.
Speaker 11: Mm hmm.
Speaker 9: Yeah, It's it's odd. Whenever I was working on the book,
Speaker 9: I had so much time that it almost worked against
Speaker 9: me because I've reworked things too many times. And then
Speaker 9: once I completed the manuscript, it was like the brain
Speaker 9: pathway opened to creative output and it was just like
Speaker 9: it just kept on rolling. And there's like so many
Speaker 9: things now that I wish were in the book that aren't.
Speaker 6: But number two, number.
Speaker 1: Two, Yeah, Hey, congratulations on the new baby too, thank you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's.
Speaker 9: Nine weeks old, so.
Speaker 11: Very much sleep.
Speaker 9: So I'm not sure if the words coming out of
Speaker 9: my mouth are really making sense, very perfect sense.
Speaker 1: And uh, you know, when we when we would when
Speaker 1: we were having our little kids, like I think at
Speaker 1: around nine months of age, this this grows people out.
Speaker 1: But at nine months age we'd start like we chew
Speaker 1: up deer meat and you just stick in their mouth
Speaker 1: that grows.
Speaker 6: It's like birds.
Speaker 1: We would do that, man, Isn't that weird?
Speaker 4: You know, maybe it'll become a new trends to It's.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we start giving them pre to deer meat, dude,
Speaker 1: they'd love it.
Speaker 9: Just can't you just give it to them and let
Speaker 9: them chew on it too?
Speaker 3: Though.
Speaker 1: When they're real little, yeah, around nine months, I feel
Speaker 1: we start giving them deer meat and that would initially
Speaker 1: just kind of give it a little quick gnaw and
Speaker 1: then hand it to them just a little. These are
Speaker 1: kids are like mega healthy. Man. I don't know there's
Speaker 1: a hot tip for you.
Speaker 9: I'll try that report.
Speaker 1: Yeah, seven months to think about it. Yeah, all right,
Speaker 1: thanks for joining, Danielle. Appreciate you coming on. Congratulations on
Speaker 1: the book. Everybody check out. Yeah, this beautiful new cookbook
Speaker 1: by Danielle Pruitt.
Speaker 3: Thank you, guys, Thank you, thanks saniel.
Speaker 1: All Right, we're gonna have a before we dig in
Speaker 1: with with our esteemed guest Chuck Black. We're gonna have
Speaker 1: a quick check in with the with the junior Duck
Speaker 1: Stamp winner who's joining us in South Korea. What are
Speaker 1: you doing in South Korea?
Speaker 12: Oh, I'm studying abroad right now because in the US
Speaker 12: I go to the University of North Carolina, but for
Speaker 12: our first semester in college, they sent us to Korea
Speaker 12: University to study.
Speaker 11: So we've been having a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Here, got it. So you when you did the So
Speaker 1: you were in high school when you did the duck stamp. Yes,
Speaker 1: and you I'm trying to understand this right. You were
Speaker 1: in an art class where the teacher is so dedicated
Speaker 1: to the duck stamp contest that half of the junior
Speaker 1: duck stamp winners come out of this one art class.
Speaker 11: Yes, that's true.
Speaker 12: Whenever we have our ceremony for Oregon, it's just like
Speaker 12: half of the entire list is.
Speaker 11: Just from our class. She's very passionate.
Speaker 6: Wow, we need to get that teacher.
Speaker 1: Out of there. So how many years did you submit?
Speaker 11: Probably also like ten years. I've been doing this since
Speaker 11: I was like seven.
Speaker 1: Incredible, You've been painting ducks since you were seven.
Speaker 11: I mean I probably.
Speaker 12: Wasn't that good at it when I was seven, but yeah,
Speaker 12: I've been going at it for like every single year.
Speaker 11: It's like a tradition. At this point.
Speaker 1: Huh do you think you're gonna keep going for uh
Speaker 1: as an adult? Once you got to enter the general competition.
Speaker 11: I think maybe when I have time in college, I'll
Speaker 11: do it.
Speaker 12: But I also I have heard that the adult contest
Speaker 12: is much harder than the Yeah, I can.
Speaker 1: See that, maybe I can see true.
Speaker 5: How old do you have to be to keep doing
Speaker 5: the Junior duck stamp?
Speaker 3: What's seventeen? I think is the So it's like K
Speaker 3: through twelve?
Speaker 1: Okay, gotcha? So tell us about the stamp there the
Speaker 1: painting you did this year for the Junior Duck stamp winner.
Speaker 12: This year I painted a king ider and I've never
Speaker 12: actually like seen a king ider in real life, unfortunately,
Speaker 12: But I just thought the colors were like super beautiful.
Speaker 11: And it is my last year doing the Junior Duck stamp.
Speaker 12: So I wanted to do something really like bold, like confidence,
Speaker 12: like something special.
Speaker 1: No, it's beautiful and it's a nice it's a really
Speaker 1: nice perspective devonnet And.
Speaker 7: I got to say, they make so the winner is
Speaker 7: a judge at the Junior so they flew me out
Speaker 7: to be a judge. And it doesn't it does not
Speaker 7: do it justice like I thought, Emily's you.
Speaker 1: Saw this, Yeah he judged so well. I thought you
Speaker 1: were to judge next year.
Speaker 7: Then no, so one in September, and then the junior
Speaker 7: is in April.
Speaker 13: Oh okay, so yeah, yeah, I think I.
Speaker 7: Had her tied with another one that I liked, and
Speaker 7: then I.
Speaker 3: Guess the rest of the judges pushed it over.
Speaker 1: So really, yeah.
Speaker 7: But it doesn't I want to say, it doesn't do
Speaker 7: it justice. I thought, like the colors really showed up
Speaker 7: in person.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, Emily, I forgot to say you're I
Speaker 1: forgot to introduce you. Is is it lean? How do
Speaker 1: you pronounce your last name?
Speaker 11: I believe it's Leanne?
Speaker 1: Yeah, LeAnn. Okay, where did you go to high school?
Speaker 12: I went to high school in Oregon at Sunset High School.
Speaker 12: I was kind of like in the Portland area.
Speaker 3: Okay, that was our big marching band competition school.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, like that was your rival in marching band.
Speaker 3: It was yeah actually oh yeah yeah.
Speaker 7: I grew up in Vancouver, Washington, across the river, so yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: throw it out.
Speaker 1: Yeah anyway, so when you win, when you win the
Speaker 1: junior Duck stamp, is it just honor? Is there?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: Do you win something.
Speaker 12: I think there was like like a cash prize, but
Speaker 12: I think a lot of the experience was like being
Speaker 12: able to like go out to the ceremony and like
Speaker 12: meeting all the people. It was so cool and like
Speaker 12: meeting all the collectors is really special.
Speaker 1: How much cash are you talking about? I could find
Speaker 1: it online, so it's not I'm not prime. A thousand
Speaker 1: you got a thousand bucks? What'd you do with it?
Speaker 12: I probably spent it all on like food here already.
Speaker 1: So you used to feed yourself. That's great, that's good.
Speaker 1: Use your money. So since you won, since you won
Speaker 1: the junior duck stamp competition, you finished high school in Portland,
Speaker 1: and then you enrolled in college, and you're in college
Speaker 1: now and you're going to college.
Speaker 12: Where to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Speaker 1: Okay, tar heels yep, yep. And then for your first
Speaker 1: semester they then send you overseas to South Korea to study. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, all right, man, Do you have it? Do
Speaker 1: you have it in your mind that you now autit?
Speaker 1: You need to go see a king ider.
Speaker 11: I think I might have to, like me meet the
Speaker 11: duck that.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you honestly have to.
Speaker 1: I think you should. And then uh, I also understand
Speaker 1: that this this struck me I picked. I always pictured
Speaker 1: that everyone that paints ducks, especially for duck stamps, likes
Speaker 1: to hunt ducks. You've never hunted ducks.
Speaker 11: I've never hunted ducks in my life.
Speaker 1: Do you have any desire to hunt ducks?
Speaker 11: I think, hmm, I might.
Speaker 12: I might have to try it out one day, actually,
Speaker 12: but I've never really had the opportunity to.
Speaker 1: When you get back in the US, you can come
Speaker 1: if you want to come hunt ducks with us. You
Speaker 1: can come hunt ducks with us.
Speaker 11: Oh really, this is an invitation.
Speaker 1: It is like December early January will be the time
Speaker 1: you want to do it. I'm not joking. If you
Speaker 1: come up, we'll take you duck hunting.
Speaker 4: She told me your favorite thing to eat is duck.
Speaker 1: That's why.
Speaker 11: You like.
Speaker 1: You like eating duck, but you don't hunt ducks.
Speaker 11: I had it last week.
Speaker 1: There's a great way to get ducks. You want to
Speaker 1: buy a cookbook.
Speaker 3: It's called duck hunting.
Speaker 1: If you know, I'm serious. If you want to come out,
Speaker 1: if you want to come out sometime in December early January,
Speaker 1: just talk to Krin. We'll take you duck hunting. We'll
Speaker 1: show what a duck looks like. We'll be like, that's
Speaker 1: an actual duck king. We'll show you. We'll show you
Speaker 1: what a mallard looks like. Way, thanks for joining us.
Speaker 11: Emily, Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: What time is it where you're at It's one am.
Speaker 11: It's it's almost two am now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, man, thanks for taking the time.
Speaker 1: Yeah, good luck in the future. I hope you keep painting. Congratulations. Yeah, congratulations, gratulations.
Speaker 1: That's super cool.
Speaker 3: Thanks Emily.
Speaker 1: Bye, right, Chuck, you ready to dig in?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 1: Okay? Can I ask you a question first about duck stamps.
Speaker 1: Wasn't it a thing like wasn't there some little uh
Speaker 1: like controversy recently where you're not allowed to have a
Speaker 1: person in Were they trying to make it a rule
Speaker 1: that you had to start having a hunter in the
Speaker 1: duck stamp? Is this? Do you know what I'm talking about?
Speaker 3: It was a hunting element.
Speaker 1: Which did that happen or not happen?
Speaker 7: It happened, and I want to say it was two
Speaker 7: or three years that that was a requirement to put
Speaker 7: into your design, which I'm not opposed, but I think
Speaker 7: a lot of the artists, and I definitely felt similar
Speaker 7: were frustrated because it's hard enough to paint the duck
Speaker 7: and then when you have to try and compose it
Speaker 7: to make it all work with like a labrador in
Speaker 7: the background or floating.
Speaker 3: Right and you know, and that's you know, and then
Speaker 3: that's what won.
Speaker 7: But then I think there's controversy in that because that's
Speaker 7: not what we're supposed to do with Sportsman.
Speaker 1: But it was painted. The painting was taken right before
Speaker 1: he picked it up.
Speaker 7: Yeah, so I think the number of entries dropped a
Speaker 7: little bit.
Speaker 3: That I didn't enter.
Speaker 7: I entered once I tried that, and I didn't do
Speaker 7: it the following year, because I mean, it's it adds
Speaker 7: more time. It's hard when you're just complicating the design,
Speaker 7: and so I think a lot of artists advocated like,
Speaker 7: just let us do what we want and if we
Speaker 7: want to do a hunting element and yeah, So.
Speaker 1: How many submissions do they get every year for the
Speaker 1: duck stamp?
Speaker 7: Around two hundred And that's down a lot from the nineties,
Speaker 7: where I think the height of it was like twenty
Speaker 7: two hundred. Wow, But that was like that was like
Speaker 7: when the Fargo movie came out like that was like
Speaker 7: that era.
Speaker 1: So you want to talk about fargo. Third, I was
Speaker 1: trying to avoid fargo, but you want to talk about fargo.
Speaker 7: But yeah, I mean I think over the years and
Speaker 7: I agree. I mean, it's frustrating as an artist when
Speaker 7: there's so many top artists that enter it, and if
Speaker 7: you're a beginner or somebody that's not as advanced, I mean,
Speaker 7: it's frustrating to spend so much time on something and
Speaker 7: then it gets thrown out within the first round, you know.
Speaker 7: So the entries have just kind of been slowly declining
Speaker 7: and it's been focusing more on the top artists.
Speaker 1: How do you submit?
Speaker 7: You just mail it in with an entry feed check
Speaker 7: one hundred and twenty five bucks and then they have
Speaker 7: a public contest every year in September, so that's coming
Speaker 7: up not this weekend, but the next.
Speaker 1: So that's it, yep. And then explain how the process
Speaker 1: of selecting a winner goes. So and when you submit it,
Speaker 1: how big you submit the original?
Speaker 7: That's the original size? So it's a seven by ten
Speaker 7: inch painting?
Speaker 1: Is that is that like the rule?
Speaker 6: It's a lot smaller than I would have thought.
Speaker 7: And I think logistically I mean they deal with two
Speaker 7: hundred entries. It's a it's a traveling judging every year.
Speaker 7: So I mean they I think there's only two people
Speaker 7: that run the Duck Stamp program. So shout out to uh, oh,
Speaker 7: my gosh. Now I'm like blank, and now I'm in
Speaker 7: the cameras that shout out to Suzanne and.
Speaker 1: My gosh, I must look it.
Speaker 6: Up for it.
Speaker 7: I'm well, I should not forget this, and they're gonna
Speaker 7: hate me for Jen.
Speaker 3: Suzanne and Jen.
Speaker 1: Well, it's fine because you're in the hot seat right now.
Speaker 1: I know you just got off the phone with your
Speaker 1: future competition.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Sorry Suzanne and Jen. But there's them to run it,
Speaker 7: and so you know, two people run this whole thing
Speaker 7: and they have to handle all of these entries, and.
Speaker 1: But they run it for the US Fish Wildlife Service.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so they're employees. Yeah.
Speaker 7: And then they pick five different judges every year, and
Speaker 7: they don't review who those are until I don't know,
Speaker 7: maybe a day or two before.
Speaker 1: Are they usually are? Those judges usually went past winners.
Speaker 7: No, So they're either like it could be somebody in
Speaker 7: an art profession, an ornithologist, somebody that works at du
Speaker 7: somebody that maybe is a like a former refuge manager.
Speaker 7: So it's always kind of like a you never know
Speaker 7: who it's going to be, but they're either bird experts, biology,
Speaker 7: art experts, things like that. And they choose five judges,
Speaker 7: and then they have the first round, which is enter out.
Speaker 7: So they go through all the entries.
Speaker 1: So all they take all those two hundred paintings and
Speaker 1: lay them up in front of the judges.
Speaker 3: They walk one by one and then they either say
Speaker 3: yes or yep, wow, yep, and.
Speaker 6: Then they have a set number or is it just
Speaker 6: like that is the initial If there's one hundred people
Speaker 6: that they like, the one hundred are and if there's
Speaker 6: five they like five.
Speaker 3: Or in yeah, So that that's the first round.
Speaker 7: Is so each judge, which is you know, they're isolated
Speaker 7: from each other, they hold up an I ron oh,
Speaker 7: and if you've got three out of five ends, then
Speaker 7: you're into the second round.
Speaker 3: And then the second.
Speaker 1: Round I'm sorry, I just want to make sure I'm understanding. Yes,
Speaker 1: they're not able to they're not communicating no, so they're
Speaker 1: not influenced by right, understood, right, And so they they
Speaker 1: isolate the five judges and then each five judges is
Speaker 1: shown two hundred, and they allow they're allowed any number
Speaker 1: of in and out. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and so you just never really know.
Speaker 7: It's not just the individual opinion of each judge. And
Speaker 7: so when you make it to the second round, then
Speaker 7: they score one through five score cards.
Speaker 1: And if how many people make it to that round.
Speaker 3: It varies.
Speaker 7: I want to say, usually no more than fifty probably,
Speaker 7: so they yeah, they narrow it down quite a bit.
Speaker 7: And then I think you need to score a six
Speaker 7: fifty teen or sixteen or higher in the second round,
Speaker 7: and then that gets you into the final round. And
Speaker 7: then in the final round they can score three, four
Speaker 7: or five, and then top score wins. If they have
Speaker 7: a tiebreaker, they do a tiebreaker, and then that's how
Speaker 7: they narrow it down.
Speaker 3: To the top three. Then what happens, that's it and
Speaker 3: they announce the winner.
Speaker 1: Well you just said top three, Well yeah.
Speaker 3: They I mean they always they always uh separate a
Speaker 3: one to two and three, I see, and they play
Speaker 3: second place there.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and then there's like many people that might be
Speaker 7: tied for fourth and fifth, sixth.
Speaker 3: But yeah, they want that comes out with the gold medal.
Speaker 7: Yeah, they want like a three distinct top entries.
Speaker 1: What are the parameters what are yeah, what are the parameters.
Speaker 2: Of a duck stamp?
Speaker 14: Like?
Speaker 1: What is what? What?
Speaker 2: Like?
Speaker 1: Yeah, here's a pun what flies and what doesn't fly?
Speaker 7: Well, you can't have writing, so it has to be
Speaker 7: and you have to have a duck that's alive.
Speaker 5: I think it doesn't have to be a duck.
Speaker 7: They picked five species each year and they rotate that
Speaker 7: so you know what's coming like three years out of
Speaker 7: three years ahead of time they announced like what each
Speaker 7: year will be, and so you get five choices and
Speaker 7: they try to rotate through all the birds. And I
Speaker 7: think the last one, which I think is eligible this
Speaker 7: year that's never made on a duck stamp is the
Speaker 7: cackling goose.
Speaker 3: But yeah, so it's any migratory what waterfalller birds?
Speaker 5: Well, but they narrow it, Sarah, keep going.
Speaker 1: They narrow that when you do it. So for the
Speaker 1: for the twenty twenty four duck stamp, they said, here's
Speaker 1: the five birds you can paint.
Speaker 3: Yes, and what were they?
Speaker 7: No, forget it was the I want to say it
Speaker 7: was the black duck, the pintail.
Speaker 1: Bluebell.
Speaker 7: I'm forgetting now. But I knew, you know, I knew
Speaker 7: that I had to do the pintail when it When
Speaker 7: I saw that that was coming up a couple of
Speaker 7: years in advance, I was like, that's my year to enter.
Speaker 1: So oh, because you're like a pintail guy.
Speaker 7: Well, we had acquired the reference in that video you
Speaker 7: had seen, and so like I knew I had something
Speaker 7: good that I.
Speaker 3: Could compose from.
Speaker 7: And so I was like, when that bird is eligible
Speaker 7: again twenty twenty three, I'm going to enter because I've
Speaker 7: been missing a couple of years because it got to
Speaker 7: the point where you spend so much time on this.
Speaker 7: You're trying to make it as an artist, and so
Speaker 7: you're trying to balance like, well, what is really effective
Speaker 7: with your time? And to spend so much time on
Speaker 7: a duct painting and then have it get thrown out,
Speaker 7: which is normally what happens when I enter, you know.
Speaker 3: It's difficult.
Speaker 7: So I was being very picky about when I would enter,
Speaker 7: and so like, when I had the reference that I
Speaker 7: wanted for a pintail, it's okay, twenty twenty three, I'm
Speaker 7: going to enter again.
Speaker 1: Now that you do, you get to is your original
Speaker 1: still your original? Yep?
Speaker 7: See, as the artist, there's no cash prize, but you
Speaker 7: get to market your own collector prints and then you
Speaker 7: keep the original.
Speaker 1: Well why don't you auction the original off?
Speaker 3: Well, it is for sale. I just haven't gotten the
Speaker 3: price that I wanted yet.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, everything's for sale for the right price, right.
Speaker 1: No, I don't want to I don't want to pry.
Speaker 1: But have passed dark stamp people had good Have they
Speaker 1: had good success selling the original? I would think it'd
Speaker 1: be a hot commodity, dude.
Speaker 7: So the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, and that's where
Speaker 7: this year's contest is. They have I want to say,
Speaker 7: close to seventy originals. So prior to that they had,
Speaker 7: prior to their collection, you know, it had gone to
Speaker 7: whoever private collectors and then one man, Richie Praeger, he's
Speaker 7: been acquiring then the last I want to say, ten
Speaker 7: years maybe or so, and then he donated all of
Speaker 7: them to the museum. So the museum has this mass
Speaker 7: collection of original paintings, and I think they've got most
Speaker 7: of them from nineteen sixty or so and on.
Speaker 1: But there's one there's an individual who's hot on it.
Speaker 1: There's an individual that buys a lot.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he started the idea, do you auction it.
Speaker 1: Through Southby's or how does it work? No, that's the
Speaker 1: real estate outfit who does all those paintings and stuff
Speaker 1: there always on the news.
Speaker 3: Christie's.
Speaker 1: Yeah maybe that often else, Yeah.
Speaker 7: Like the famous art Christie's or there's another one Christie's
Speaker 7: and Sotheby's.
Speaker 1: You'd be a really good episode we should do someday
Speaker 1: what we should get an auctioneer on mm hmm, and
Speaker 1: then we should ask that auctioneer, why do you sell?
Speaker 1: Like for livestock, talking real fast, but when they sell art,
Speaker 1: they don't talk fast.
Speaker 6: No they do. They don't I have any art auction
Speaker 6: I've ever been to their talk really fast? Really yeah maybe,
Speaker 6: I mean I don't know. I don't know about the
Speaker 6: Christie's or whatever.
Speaker 4: But yeah, those are like you drink wine and champagne
Speaker 4: and probably talk really.
Speaker 7: Maybe the bigger the price, the slower they try to compute.
Speaker 9: That.
Speaker 1: Phil, I know you're in a bad mood. Yeah, let
Speaker 1: me hear it because I asked you like a very
Speaker 1: simple question earlier. Yeah, what's up, Steve? Would we ever
Speaker 1: be able to do we have the technological capability to
Speaker 1: you know, we do the auction house of oddities. Could
Speaker 1: we have an auctioneer come in the studio and do
Speaker 1: a live auction house of oddities with one of the
Speaker 1: fast talking auctioneers.
Speaker 4: We could totally do that. We could, Yes, we should
Speaker 4: totally do a live stream prime time.
Speaker 6: Get people pumped with with.
Speaker 1: Yes, it doesn't get me pumped because I'm always trying
Speaker 1: to figure out why they're doing that, Why.
Speaker 4: We can look into the history, Clay says.
Speaker 1: Clay says, it just it just it builds exciting. But
Speaker 1: I always think you could just as well be standing
Speaker 1: there and go ten no.
Speaker 6: Because it's like people will yell yeah, they need to.
Speaker 7: They need to like get you, make you feel like
Speaker 7: the moments about the slip out of your hands.
Speaker 6: They have the callers that are like, whenever somebody who
Speaker 6: raised their hands.
Speaker 1: When we do this podcast episode we'll cover we'll briefly
Speaker 1: interview the auctioneer, ask these questions and then have a
Speaker 1: live auction house of oddities.
Speaker 3: So, so are we going to get like one hundred
Speaker 3: people on on a phone call and they're all gonna
Speaker 3: raise their virtual hand? Is that what you're saying?
Speaker 1: Or that's why I'm asking about the technology on it?
Speaker 3: Can we figure figure something out?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's how they do a lot of the like
Speaker 6: art auctions, there will be a live audience, but then
Speaker 6: they'll also take online bid so you call in, you
Speaker 6: actually call in or I guess some of them they
Speaker 6: have like a like an eBay style like bid so
Speaker 6: you could totally do it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: Man, No, Chuck, I don't want to cry. But are
Speaker 1: you I'm gonna leave this subject after this. So you
Speaker 1: have it? Is it up right now? Could people go
Speaker 1: on there and like bid on it? Or are you
Speaker 1: just trying to do like a private sale?
Speaker 7: No, I mean it's I just have it. You have
Speaker 7: and it is for sale.
Speaker 1: You're not in a huge rush. No okay, No, you
Speaker 1: didn't submit it to an auction house. No, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 7: So it's if somebody wants to buy it, contact me.
Speaker 3: No, that's kind of.
Speaker 1: I got a I got a style question for you. No,
Speaker 1: pintails have a big long tail, hence the name pintail.
Speaker 1: Did you what was your idea to have it be
Speaker 1: that the pin that the tail collides with the edge
Speaker 1: of the painting, and that the bird doesn't have room. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: why didn't you nudge him forward inch?
Speaker 7: Because now I was worried about the spacing between the
Speaker 7: bill and the edge of the painting, and so I'm
Speaker 7: trying to like gauge, you know. And I looked at
Speaker 7: past pintail winners and some of them are just playing
Speaker 7: cut the tail off.
Speaker 3: So I was trying to figure out how to fit
Speaker 3: barely the full.
Speaker 7: Tail and you know, the whole bird within the painting
Speaker 7: without I guess, making it, you know, compositionally weak. So
Speaker 7: I was I just did my best to angle it.
Speaker 7: I wanted a little bit of space between the bill
Speaker 7: and the edge of the painting, and then so I
Speaker 7: just squeezed it in the.
Speaker 1: Want to because because you want to have like, you
Speaker 1: wanted to have the bird really fill the frame, right,
Speaker 1: so it's seven by ten, and you wanted a lot
Speaker 1: of bird, and then you got this kind of bird
Speaker 1: with a weird.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but it's hard, and you know, and from the
Speaker 7: side they have one of the longest side profiles, and
Speaker 7: it's like it doesn't really fit.
Speaker 1: So you had to really shrink the bird down to
Speaker 1: include the big long tail coming out the back, right. Yeah.
Speaker 7: And I mean now you're getting into all the nuances
Speaker 7: of like the artist's decisions. I have to make to
Speaker 7: try and.
Speaker 6: I have so many questions about it.
Speaker 3: Get a judge to you know, try to win over
Speaker 3: a judge.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, good thing you didn't do it flying, otherwise you
Speaker 5: would take up the whole thing.
Speaker 3: Right, I mean?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 8: And how tough? How tough was it to mail the
Speaker 8: did you hand deliver? You mailed the original.
Speaker 7: Out, wrap it up like a you know, bomb proof
Speaker 7: and send it overnight?
Speaker 1: How tough that?
Speaker 3: I mean?
Speaker 7: I'm used to it now. That's I mail all my
Speaker 7: artwork pretty much. So we've got to I have a
Speaker 7: system down to package for shipping, mailing the kid somewhere.
Speaker 3: Yeah. It is stressful, very stressful.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, imagine. Yeah. I got in a big fight
Speaker 1: with Clay, our body Clay one time because we were
Speaker 1: looking at a painting and we were arguing about whether
Speaker 1: it was the morning or night mm hmm, so much
Speaker 1: so that we eventually had to go to the artist
Speaker 1: and he said it was night, which he like kind
Speaker 1: of messed up because it was actually the morning.
Speaker 4: You wouldn't, you, guys, wouldn't.
Speaker 6: The artist told you it was the night and you
Speaker 6: said he was wrong?
Speaker 4: You were?
Speaker 7: Like I think about that a lot too, Like if
Speaker 7: I have the sun coming from one angle and if
Speaker 7: there's a storm in the sky, I I mean most
Speaker 7: of the time it's coming from west to east. And
Speaker 7: so if you have the light coming from the right
Speaker 7: or whatever, and that would indicate like evening. But if
Speaker 7: you're the light coming from the other way, it should
Speaker 7: be you should be facing south.
Speaker 1: And yeah, well these guys look to me like they're
Speaker 1: riding out in the morning. Yeah, Clay felt look like
Speaker 1: they're riding back home at night. And I was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: because if you're coming in at night, you know it.
Speaker 1: Just they didn't look like that. They looked like they
Speaker 1: were just getting going.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So is this this morning or evening morning?
Speaker 5: I was gonna say that's where I had.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is morning. Don't even try some bullshit.
Speaker 7: So that the background of that is the Centennial Valley.
Speaker 7: That's the Red Rocks Refuge. But they only had a
Speaker 7: die cut for one way, so they had to flip
Speaker 7: the background on the carrier, so it's actually backwards.
Speaker 1: You explain that to me again.
Speaker 7: So the carrier, which is what the dollar bill sheet
Speaker 7: that the stamp comes on. The artists can design that, yes,
Speaker 7: and so the background you got to design.
Speaker 6: This, yes, Yeah, So that was gonna be my question.
Speaker 6: So you win, and then you have to did you
Speaker 6: have to paint that after paint.
Speaker 1: A whole another damn dark?
Speaker 7: It's optional, but I mean, I'm not going to pass
Speaker 7: up with the opportunity.
Speaker 3: So it's if you flip it.
Speaker 7: That's the background that overlooks the refuge down at Red Rocks.
Speaker 7: And they only had a die cut where they could
Speaker 7: put the stamp on the right side, and so being
Speaker 7: that I put the bird, they had to flip it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, you know what, now I feel bad because
Speaker 1: when I buy these, I always just peel that sticker
Speaker 1: off and throw that out right. Yeah. I never knew
Speaker 1: I was thrown out. I've never even looked to see
Speaker 1: that I was thrown out art.
Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, I'll sign it for you now, now you'll
Speaker 3: hang on to it.
Speaker 1: You sign that right now for me? Yeah? Yeah.
Speaker 6: And another element of the duck stamp. Tell me about
Speaker 6: the remark on the back. So another part of the
Speaker 6: competition is the sketch on the back, right, And that's
Speaker 6: a different winner.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: And that's Kira who is popular on TikTok and she
Speaker 7: started her duck stamp journey a few years back. And
Speaker 7: so they pick like a you know, different artists every
Speaker 7: year to do the they get highlight you know, like
Speaker 7: maybe up and coming artists or whatever.
Speaker 3: So yeah, she did that.
Speaker 1: Do you know any of the stats on on duck stamps,
Speaker 1: like how many? How many? You know? I know that
Speaker 1: they sell about a million?
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, a million and a half.
Speaker 1: And what are they charging this year? Twenty twenty five?
Speaker 7: For it's been twenty five for I want to say,
Speaker 7: almost ten years now, hasn't Oh was.
Speaker 1: It that long ago they raised it? Well, yeah, I
Speaker 1: remember everybody had a fit when they raised it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then it woant being that adjustment for inflation, it
Speaker 1: was still less expensive than when it was launched.
Speaker 7: And they just surpassed a billion dollars raised in the
Speaker 7: program's history.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and then and then like ninety percent of
Speaker 1: that goes the wetlands, right.
Speaker 3: I think ninety eight percent of every dollar.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, that's why you buy so many.
Speaker 5: Max got to give it back somehow, sure, man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, can you sign the Yeah, don't sign the
Speaker 1: fronts and it looks like you're the one hunting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I can do with that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, tell me about the life of an artist, man
Speaker 1: like you don't just.
Speaker 3: Do this, right, Yeah, I just paint.
Speaker 1: No, I mean you don't just know, you don't just
Speaker 1: live to like paint your one ducky year.
Speaker 3: No, there's more to it, no, I mean.
Speaker 7: It's as an artist for me, well, like what art
Speaker 7: means to me is like storytelling. I think of it
Speaker 7: like conservation storytelling. So without the story, there's not a
Speaker 7: painting for me, like it, I have a hard time
Speaker 7: getting excited about the painting work. Like to me, that's
Speaker 7: the work part of it.
Speaker 1: Yep.
Speaker 3: Just being outside.
Speaker 7: And experiences while doing all the things we love, that's
Speaker 7: what gets me fired up. And so now I've started
Speaker 7: to journal and that helps me, you know, like articulate
Speaker 7: the stories that I.
Speaker 3: Want to convey.
Speaker 1: M h.
Speaker 7: And I guess that's like how each piece is born.
Speaker 7: And so I usually start with like an idea for
Speaker 7: a story. Then I'll try to like hunt for the
Speaker 7: reference that I need piece to like how am I
Speaker 7: going to piece this together? And then that's how like
Speaker 7: each painting starts to develop. So like I struggle with
Speaker 7: custom work, and that's why I don't do that anymore
Speaker 7: because it's I mean, it's it's.
Speaker 3: A labor, you know.
Speaker 7: And the only way that I can push myself through
Speaker 7: it is to really be excited about it, and so
Speaker 7: it has to have like a lot of personal meaning
Speaker 7: to me.
Speaker 1: So with custom work, it just doesn't hit you, like
Speaker 1: you just don't know where it's coming from.
Speaker 7: Sometimes, Yeah, I think there's like, from my perspective, there's
Speaker 7: like two types of artists. There's the artist that really
Speaker 7: gets excited about the art work itself and then all
Speaker 7: the you know, the way paint manipulates with different types
Speaker 7: of service surfaces and mediums and whether it's different drawing
Speaker 7: materials and you know, and they just love that work
Speaker 7: and so you ask them to do a custom painting,
Speaker 7: They're like, you're gonna pay me to do what I
Speaker 7: love so much.
Speaker 3: And then there's.
Speaker 7: The artist that I feel like has a true passion
Speaker 7: outside of the work of painting itself, and it's a
Speaker 7: lot hard for them to do something that doesn't like
Speaker 7: come from, you know, what's like natural to them or
Speaker 7: what they experience or whatever.
Speaker 3: And so I feel like I'm more of the latter.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting distinction. Yeah, how do you decide on
Speaker 1: what pose?
Speaker 8: And did you at one point were you painting that
Speaker 8: from the very beginning. Is there more than one?
Speaker 1: Do you do? You you wadded up.
Speaker 8: And throw it in the trash and start over, or
Speaker 8: how did you decide on that? What's the process of
Speaker 8: doing that?
Speaker 7: So it's changed a lot over time. I mean when
Speaker 7: I started out, it was very simple and just like, oh,
Speaker 7: I think this would be great, and then I paint it.
Speaker 7: I don't feel like I understood composition as much early on.
Speaker 7: This was the first stamp that I really took my
Speaker 7: time studying what makes our eyes attracted to certain things visually?
Speaker 7: And so I, you know, started studying like the Fibonacci
Speaker 7: sequence and that golden ratio.
Speaker 1: Well, tell me what that is, they will fill.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So Fibonaci.
Speaker 7: He was a mathematician, I don't know, like fourteen hundreds
Speaker 7: or sixteen. I mean this is way back when, and
Speaker 7: they started to figure out that there was a sequence
Speaker 7: of numbers like zero in one equal two, and then
Speaker 7: two and one are three, and then three and two
Speaker 7: are five and five and three are eight, and they
Speaker 7: started to realize that this was their way of trying
Speaker 7: to figure out math. And it was a I think
Speaker 7: based off of like a Romans maybe Roman numerals or something,
Speaker 7: and they started to figure out that nature exhibited this
Speaker 7: very sequence of numbers, and so like, for instance, if
Speaker 7: you look down a branch of a tree, you'll see
Speaker 7: that each leaf follows as it you know, projects out
Speaker 7: of the branch, it follows that spiral yep, And it's
Speaker 7: the exact same pattern or like a galaxy in the sky,
Speaker 7: the way it.
Speaker 3: Swirls snail shells a nail s yep.
Speaker 7: And so they started to figure out that this was
Speaker 7: something that nature exhibited everywhere, and then artists caught onto that, like,
Speaker 7: well we should start composing our paintings that way. And
Speaker 7: that's when you think of like the old masters and
Speaker 7: like why were that era there was an error where
Speaker 7: artwork exploded and it was just you know, amazing compared
Speaker 7: to what it was previously done. And they started to
Speaker 7: incorporate this mathematical sequence into their paintings and like how
Speaker 7: to position based on you know, this is the edges
Speaker 7: of the painting. We want to put it a certain
Speaker 7: distance across from one direction from the other, and that
Speaker 7: you know, aligned with that sequence of numbers. And so
Speaker 7: that's how they started to figure out, like, and that's
Speaker 7: what we consider like compositional rules today.
Speaker 3: And like art academia and things.
Speaker 7: So I started to study that and started to figure
Speaker 7: out like how to position the head of the bird,
Speaker 7: where to put it, different things like that.
Speaker 6: And are you classically trained? Did you go to art school? No,
Speaker 6: this is all research You've done.
Speaker 3: Yourself, right, So, yeah, like that have you heard of
Speaker 3: that before?
Speaker 6: Yeah, it's art. You know, a lot of composing a
Speaker 6: painting is math. And the role of thirds for photography,
Speaker 6: like it's all just anything visual does take a lot
Speaker 6: of you know, compositional math. And I don't know if
Speaker 6: they teach that, and I didn't go to arts.
Speaker 3: I think, I mean, I think it's pretty common knowledge.
Speaker 3: A lot of people know about this.
Speaker 7: It's it's harder to implement than it is to understand it.
Speaker 7: And I mean because then you're there's just so many
Speaker 7: things when you're trying to paint a picture that come
Speaker 7: up that make it difficult. But yeah, like I really
Speaker 7: started to think about things like that, So, like back
Speaker 7: to your question. This year, I had like a very
Speaker 7: strict system of like Okay, I'm going to think about
Speaker 7: the rule of thirds, I'm going to think about where
Speaker 7: the horizon should be.
Speaker 3: I'm going to do a large duck to keep it
Speaker 3: big so that.
Speaker 7: I wasn't giving a judge a reason to vote it out,
Speaker 7: because sometimes you make too many. You may make a
Speaker 7: pair of birds and they become too small, and then
Speaker 7: judges might think, well when you shrink it down, it
Speaker 7: might not fit on a stamp. Well, so there's different
Speaker 7: things like that. So I'm like, I'm gonna keep it
Speaker 7: one bird, and I'm going to really study all these
Speaker 7: what art professionals considered, like the rules of composition, and
Speaker 7: I'm going to try my best to implement them all.
Speaker 7: Which is funny that this was the year that I
Speaker 7: won and it paid off. Not only that, but I
Speaker 7: mean I've never came close, you know, So.
Speaker 6: Really I have one more like nerdy art question and
Speaker 6: then I'll questions, so the how close in your reference
Speaker 6: material is the color theory? So like did you were
Speaker 6: you going off of the time of day and color
Speaker 6: or did you tweak the colors at all? Because I
Speaker 6: just so I really love to color.
Speaker 7: I kind of make up the background colors a lot.
Speaker 7: That's just something that I really like to do. But
Speaker 7: that was also you know, if I'm painting a detailed picture,
Speaker 7: like the background of the carrier, I might try and
Speaker 7: use photos to follow what's true to life, you know,
Speaker 7: more accurately. But then on the stamp, I'm like, I'm
Speaker 7: gonna make him look like he's in a portrait studio.
Speaker 7: And so I just kind of like pulled some colors
Speaker 7: out and it was like, I think this would compliment
Speaker 7: you know, the the the reddish brown of the head,
Speaker 7: make it somewhat blue, but you want to keep it warm,
Speaker 7: so I use like purples and pinks, and I thought
Speaker 7: that would like be a good contrast against like the
Speaker 7: brown of the bird. So yeah, it was mostly made
Speaker 7: up the background itself, and then the color.
Speaker 6: You did a good job because the color really stands
Speaker 6: out to me, Yeah, thank you, gorgeous.
Speaker 8: It does, and it's not you know, iridescent green like
Speaker 8: a Mallard's head or something. So it seems like it
Speaker 8: would be a challenge in itself doing like a you know,
Speaker 8: you got a white and then gray and then brown
Speaker 8: with that pintae.
Speaker 5: Yep, personally, I think the pintail is one of the prettiest. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean, just with that chocolate head too.
Speaker 7: Right, well, and then so what's funny, you know, and
Speaker 7: that's obviously that's like a lot of people's favorite bird.
Speaker 7: But what when I started studying like these compositional rules,
Speaker 7: that golden spiral that we talked about, it actually fits
Speaker 7: perfectly on a pintail's head, the way that the white
Speaker 7: swirls up into the head. And then I started wondering,
Speaker 7: I'm like, maybe that, like, is that part of the
Speaker 7: reason why so many people are attracted to this species
Speaker 7: of bird. It's because it's just like it's like the
Speaker 7: perfect example of nature at its finest. You know.
Speaker 5: For me as a hunter, it was always like the
Speaker 5: golden goose egg that like, yeah, like pintails take a
Speaker 5: long time to fully plume out during the fall, and
Speaker 5: it's like all these southern states in the Western States
Speaker 5: get these pin full plumed pintails all the time. Growing
Speaker 5: up in North Dakota, I was just shooting brown ducks
Speaker 5: the whole time, and like it was like a prized item,
Speaker 5: shooting one in December it being fully plumed out, and
Speaker 5: we would only get like a couple maybe a couple
Speaker 5: of year, right, So it's just like a cherry on top, Yeah,
Speaker 5: like it was. I was the it's a rare, Yeah,
Speaker 5: it's away so cool.
Speaker 1: I think that you're maybe because it's like the duck stamp,
Speaker 1: but I feel like it's more it's more kind of
Speaker 1: conservative than your normal paintings.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and they make you tone it way down, uh,
Speaker 1: not make you right you, I mean you can't have
Speaker 1: like you can't it can't be like loud and surprising.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean you can take the chance, but that's Yeah,
Speaker 7: it's like a lot of times when you try.
Speaker 3: That, that's the quickest way to get voted out.
Speaker 7: So it's I don't know, but maybe some you just
Speaker 7: never know who the people are going to be. And
Speaker 7: that's these people that have been entering it since the eighties.
Speaker 7: I'll just tell you it doesn't matter how good it is,
Speaker 7: because you get one person that is like, well, I
Speaker 7: hate pentails.
Speaker 3: My favorite duck is the spoon bail.
Speaker 1: Yeah. That's because they could just they could throw you
Speaker 1: out for this arbitrary.
Speaker 7: I mean that, Yeah, they could give you a one
Speaker 7: out of five just cut. I mean, so it's it's
Speaker 7: up to the end.
Speaker 5: That's kind of a reason why they don't tell you
Speaker 5: who is the judges, right, so you don't paint towards
Speaker 5: their Yeah, favorites.
Speaker 6: I don't Yeah, how did you find out that you won.
Speaker 3: So they stream it live, so so everybody, yeah, everybody listening.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 7: And so my wife was actually gone on vacation, so
Speaker 7: I was home alone and I'm just like sitting in
Speaker 7: my bed vacation. You're like, no, yeah, and uh so
Speaker 7: I'm just watching and and you know, I have made
Speaker 7: it to the second round before. But then in the
Speaker 7: second round, I tied for first with one person who
Speaker 7: you know, you can kind of tell whose painting is
Speaker 7: who once you really start following these artists, like you
Speaker 7: can see their style in the painting, and so I
Speaker 7: knew who the artist was, and I tied going into
Speaker 7: the third round, and then they're like, all right, no,
Speaker 7: we're going to break for lunch and we'll see you
Speaker 7: in an hour. And I just like, I mean, i
Speaker 7: was pacing, like my heart rates started going.
Speaker 5: I'm just like I would have loved to be a
Speaker 5: fly on the wall during this watching you.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and then I want there was a two judge.
Speaker 7: There's I think just one judge that changed their mind
Speaker 7: in the final round and they switched his entry from
Speaker 7: like a five to a four, and that's how I won.
Speaker 3: With that more guy changed their mind.
Speaker 7: Yeah, Well, because like you know that from the second
Speaker 7: round score that they gave in the final round, they
Speaker 7: decided to take a point away.
Speaker 6: So and then and that's when you knew that you won.
Speaker 7: Well, then that was probably there's twenty entries to judge
Speaker 7: after that, so I had gotten the score and then
Speaker 7: his was like basically right after and I was like, okay,
Speaker 7: I'm in first now, and then there was there was
Speaker 7: still some entries that were one point off or something
Speaker 7: like that in the second round. So then you have
Speaker 7: to sit there and wait.
Speaker 3: And then it comes doun like you just watching online?
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can't go.
Speaker 3: There, you can.
Speaker 7: I couldn't make it work last year. I really wanted to.
Speaker 7: But yeah, so yeah, it was just a live feed
Speaker 7: on YouTube.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and then what.
Speaker 14: Was your celebration?
Speaker 6: Yeah, were you like what that the panic attack?
Speaker 1: Jumping?
Speaker 3: Basically? Yeah, like yeah, did you break anything? I might have?
Speaker 1: Yeah? How many people were watching the live.
Speaker 7: Uh, there's always I want to say five or six hundred.
Speaker 7: Maybe maybe that's a little bit high. I don't know,
Speaker 7: but you call your wife. Yeah, well they all, I
Speaker 7: mean everybody was watching wherever they were, so like yeah,
Speaker 7: then my phone starts just going crazy and I'm like,
Speaker 7: I gotta let's get the call from them first, and
Speaker 7: then I'll talk to friends and family and.
Speaker 6: Yeah, wow, that's so exciting.
Speaker 3: Yeah so they called you, yeah, yeah, and what do
Speaker 3: they say? Congratulations?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they assume you already knew. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Typically, like it's I think the most artists.
Speaker 7: Watch it now. That's kind of like a standard now.
Speaker 7: But yeah, it's pretty crazy, Like couldn't believe it at first.
Speaker 1: So how much does how much does life change for
Speaker 1: someone that gets that level of recognition, Like it's got
Speaker 1: to cause a lot of people to come, you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of people to start paying attention to your
Speaker 1: wildlife art for a while, right.
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 7: And I yes, And you know, the biggest thing is
Speaker 7: just like the ability to network has been amazing and
Speaker 7: like meeting people and Ducks Unlimited and all these organizations
Speaker 7: and you know, creating new friends and connections and that's
Speaker 7: been awesome. And they, you know, they kind of have
Speaker 7: a tour for you. So you go to the Easton
Speaker 7: Waterfall Festival in Maryland. Then I got an opportunity to
Speaker 7: go to the like the big National Delta event down
Speaker 7: in Louisiana, and so just meeting people and networking that's
Speaker 7: been huge. But I mean, honestly, you win in September
Speaker 7: and then the first day of sale is not until
Speaker 7: June twenty eighth, so it's basically just a big lull.
Speaker 7: And then even in I think it was like end
Speaker 7: of July, I went all around town to any place
Speaker 7: that I could post office Sportsman's nob nobody even had
Speaker 7: them yet. So I mean, I think people are just
Speaker 7: starting to purchase them now, and I am no. I mean,
Speaker 7: there is definitely a lot more people kind of finding
Speaker 7: me online and flowing my way, So it's I think
Speaker 7: it's probably at the beginning of that, just because it's
Speaker 7: you know, hunting seasons still, I guess coming up for
Speaker 7: a lot of people.
Speaker 1: So it's funny because it's a piece of artwork that
Speaker 1: so many people will buy, and they'll buy it and
Speaker 1: they're like, oh shit, I gotta run and get my
Speaker 1: duck stamp, you know, sign their wallet, and yeah, probably
Speaker 1: many will probably not look at it. Yeah well, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean they look at it like a license, you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. They're gonna look at they look
Speaker 1: at it like a license.
Speaker 7: And an art And now this is the first year
Speaker 7: that they have the East stamp. You've heard about this,
Speaker 7: so Congress passed I think in in May. So it's
Speaker 7: an E stamp, but they want it, you know, and
Speaker 7: I think the the Duck Stamp Office probably advocated for
Speaker 7: this too. They still wanted to have the physical as
Speaker 7: part of that aspect. So you buy the E stamp
Speaker 7: and then you get your physical in the mail in March,
Speaker 7: and that's so that you don't have an E stamp
Speaker 7: on your phone. And then you get the physical and
Speaker 7: you can give it away to your buddy or whatever.
Speaker 1: I see, so they send it.
Speaker 3: They will, Yeah, they will.
Speaker 1: But I didn't know that that became a thing. The
Speaker 1: Arkansas the states to him, Yeah, I know. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't mean what states aren't E stamps.
Speaker 7: And I got to say that like general consensus, especially
Speaker 7: going to the Delta Expo. I mean, there's tens of
Speaker 7: thousands of people there.
Speaker 3: It was very obvious that everybody wanted this.
Speaker 7: So many hunters are like, thank god, we finally can
Speaker 7: just buy one on the phone now, and like there's
Speaker 7: such a pain to like sure, So definitely what the
Speaker 7: majority of hunters I think, if.
Speaker 5: You decide you're going duck hunting at nine o'clock at night.
Speaker 7: Right the next day and now nowhere to get I
Speaker 7: think that was the main reason.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm gonna tell you. I'm going to tell
Speaker 1: you a duck stamp story. Remember earlier Max were talking
Speaker 1: about those rivers in Alaska, Okay, sitting at a launch
Speaker 1: one time, coming back from duck hunting in Alaska, and
Speaker 1: we're just loading the boat up and there's like a
Speaker 1: guy hanging around being like, oh, gee shucks, I never
Speaker 1: seen a duck right, And all of a sudden we're
Speaker 1: like shooting the shipping ball. Sudden he pulls his badge.
Speaker 1: He's a trooper, an Alaska trooper. But it's his strategy
Speaker 1: was just to act like a Gothen tourist, you know,
Speaker 1: thinking that you're gonna be like, you think that's cool.
Speaker 1: Look at all this yeah, at all this crazy shit.
Speaker 3: I got it.
Speaker 1: I'm not supposed to have Anyways, that year almost got
Speaker 1: in trouble, but wound up not getting trouble because that year,
Speaker 1: like their Duxies and the Duxies in their opens early
Speaker 1: and the state stamp, something wound up happening. The state
Speaker 1: stamp was not available, was not available like fishing game
Speaker 1: and no one had the state stamp, and we looked
Speaker 1: and looked and looked, and they're like, the state stamps.
Speaker 1: Something happened. The state stamp's not available. So we went
Speaker 1: duck hunting and he's like, where's your state stamp? Like,
Speaker 1: funny you ask it's not available. We were told it's
Speaker 1: not available, so we didn't. When when I'm not getting
Speaker 1: in trouble, he said, like, go get it when it's available.
Speaker 3: Interesting, Now, were.
Speaker 6: You sweating a little bit?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, sweating a lot?
Speaker 3: Yeah, I sweat a lot.
Speaker 1: I felt that there would have been a big memo
Speaker 1: out to all the enforcement people saying that one it's
Speaker 1: that we opened the season yeah, with no availability of
Speaker 1: the thing, like you couldn't get it. Oh, I sweating
Speaker 1: and bad. That seemed like a bad thing to get
Speaker 1: in trouble for. And then it caused me to question
Speaker 1: like were you really supposed to stay home? Like it
Speaker 1: felt weird that it's like the season but you can't
Speaker 1: go because of So we just kind of felt like, well,
Speaker 1: when it's available, we'll buy it.
Speaker 6: Hm. That's a tough one.
Speaker 1: That's a duck stamp story. That's the only duck damp
Speaker 1: story I got for you.
Speaker 5: I've got a couple of like not signing my stamp
Speaker 5: and then getting checked and like usually they're pretty good
Speaker 5: about like, oh, just sign it, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah. So what we're talking about is when you buy
Speaker 1: a Duck stamp for you people out there that don't
Speaker 1: buy Duck stamps because you don't hunt ducks. One, if
Speaker 1: you hunt ducks, yeah.
Speaker 6: To buy the damn stamp, you should buy it anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, But the reason they signed it is they don't
Speaker 1: want you to be able to just lend your body
Speaker 1: your your stamp, So they wanted like signed across the
Speaker 1: face and that becomes your stamp. And you can't like
Speaker 1: swap stamps because there's nothing on that has your you know,
Speaker 1: doesn't like it's not like made out to your name.
Speaker 1: There's no serial numbers signed to you. So you you
Speaker 1: you graffiti the artwork, You defame the art work with
Speaker 1: your own.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, keep one for the you.
Speaker 1: Know, always I keep all of the mine.
Speaker 8: And I always thought about that because I'm gonna pass
Speaker 8: them down to my son and my grandchildren, and I
Speaker 8: thought about I should buy two, and then I thought
Speaker 8: now that if it was me, I would want one
Speaker 8: with my grandfather's signature, Yeah, So that's.
Speaker 7: I talked to a guy that had every stamp that
Speaker 7: his grandpa he started hunting when the first year of
Speaker 7: the stamp came out, or he didn't start, but he
Speaker 7: had from nineteen thirty five or whatever. He had every
Speaker 7: stamp and then he gave up hunting. He was telling
Speaker 7: me the story at the expo, and then he convinced
Speaker 7: his grandpa to go out one more time, and you know,
Speaker 7: he of course had saved them all, and so he
Speaker 7: grandpa was like nineteen ninety two, He bought one more stamp,
Speaker 7: went out and then he got a picture of his
Speaker 7: bag limit of teal or something with his grandpa with
Speaker 7: a bird dog standing.
Speaker 3: On the hill.
Speaker 7: And then he's got it framed with him in the center,
Speaker 7: and then all the stamps all the way around people.
Speaker 3: Such the coolest thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, how avid of a duck hunter are you?
Speaker 7: When I was a kid, I was, but archery has
Speaker 7: won me over year by year. So but I mean,
Speaker 7: I love to go. It's to me, it's like that's
Speaker 7: quality time with friends. And that's why I love to go.
Speaker 2: If you know you get the chance, yep.
Speaker 1: So you're not you're not like a super dedicated waterfowl.
Speaker 3: Hunter, not so much.
Speaker 7: I mean anymore, I'm thinking about how to fill the
Speaker 7: freezer the quickest way possible, and like, so that's I mean,
Speaker 7: that's always my first priority, which usually ends up taking
Speaker 7: the entire fall.
Speaker 1: Yeah, cause you mean so you can have more time
Speaker 1: to get back to your painting, right, yeah, And then
Speaker 1: are you able to is that are you at a
Speaker 1: point where you just are an artist and you're an artist,
Speaker 1: you don't do any kind of other work. Nope.
Speaker 7: I came here in twenty fifteen and just decided to
Speaker 7: go for it, and it's been a rough road, but
Speaker 7: I mean, thankfully the internet has kind of helped out
Speaker 7: over the years, and that's kind of been like the
Speaker 7: avenue to.
Speaker 5: Your YouTube page is unbelievable. Oh, thank you with I
Speaker 5: mean thousands and thousands of followers. Yeah, but not to
Speaker 5: mention just hundreds of videos of just like the process
Speaker 5: of the painting and you actually did a cool painting
Speaker 5: behind the scenes of this stamp, right.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, like kind of like the background story yep, yep.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 7: And I mean I started the YouTube because I had
Speaker 7: no money. I had like ran out first year I
Speaker 7: was here. I saved up what to do before.
Speaker 3: Sorry, I was a I.
Speaker 7: Went to school for wildlife biology, so I was a
Speaker 7: wildlife tech for majority of my twenties. In seven years,
Speaker 7: I saved up like fifty five hundred dollars doing that,
Speaker 7: which so they don't.
Speaker 3: Pay a lot.
Speaker 7: But I was like, all right, this is maybe like
Speaker 7: a year's worth to live off, and I went for it.
Speaker 7: And then of course I just flat out ran out
Speaker 7: of money, and then the YouTube was kind of like
Speaker 7: out of desperation, like, well, maybe I needed to like
Speaker 7: kind of do what Bob Ross did and maybe that
Speaker 7: would help. And so I literally started the YouTube as
Speaker 7: like maybe this could help me financially, and then that
Speaker 7: you know, seeing response of other artists, and then other
Speaker 7: people thought it was interesting and it just kind of
Speaker 7: like progressed from there. And then that's been like a
Speaker 7: definitely a stability of the you know, making it as
Speaker 7: an artist.
Speaker 3: That's helped a lot.
Speaker 1: If you took that head off with your hair, just
Speaker 1: go like.
Speaker 3: That's what I'm waiting, No, not quite.
Speaker 6: How would you describe your style and your work outside
Speaker 6: of the duck stamp paintings?
Speaker 7: Like I said earlier, I think of it as conservation storytelling,
Speaker 7: So you're doing so, And I mean, like I never
Speaker 7: I never dreamed of being an artist growing up. It
Speaker 7: was always like I wanted to do wildlife conservation and
Speaker 7: so like anything that kept me outside around wildlife, just helping,
Speaker 7: that was what I was passionate about.
Speaker 3: And still am.
Speaker 7: And then through that, obviously I was entering the duck
Speaker 7: stamp and art was always an interest on the side,
Speaker 7: and it had started growing. I started noticing that people
Speaker 7: took interest in it and they really started to engage
Speaker 7: with like the stories I was trying to convey, you know,
Speaker 7: and I think back of like Terry Redlin was a
Speaker 7: huge inspiration when I was a kid growing up in Minnesota,
Speaker 7: and so like I think I started out trying to
Speaker 7: figure out how to tell stories like that, like how
Speaker 7: did he how was he so good at telling stories?
Speaker 7: And how could I do that in my own way?
Speaker 7: And once I started seeing people react to it and
Speaker 7: engage with it, and I started thinking like, maybe this
Speaker 7: is a way to to further what I'd like to
Speaker 7: contribute to conservation by just getting people's attention, Like maybe
Speaker 7: sometimes you don't have to have a greater purpose other
Speaker 7: than just engaging people and starting a conversation. So I thought, well,
Speaker 7: maybe I could tell stories around things that I really
Speaker 7: care about and that that would bring interest towards those subjects.
Speaker 7: And so that's where that's how I started.
Speaker 3: To think about my artwork.
Speaker 7: And then that you know a few years later, I
Speaker 7: won the Colorado and the California Duck stamp, and then
Speaker 7: that's when I was like, Okay, I got just give
Speaker 7: this a try.
Speaker 6: Nice. Your pieces do have a really cool like narrative
Speaker 6: element where that includes all the elements like the landscape,
Speaker 6: maybe even a little human element like a barn and
Speaker 6: some of them, or like the obviously the wildlife. I
Speaker 6: love that narrative aspect of your work.
Speaker 4: Yeah, got some examples, Yeah, I can put on the screen.
Speaker 1: So that's a yeah, that's amazing that.
Speaker 7: That's a close up of one. And then the next one,
Speaker 7: which was the canue birds.
Speaker 4: Are in there just came max Is on it like
Speaker 4: the skies opened up.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah, yeah, so that's I'm not going to say
Speaker 7: what this painting is for just yet, but so those
Speaker 7: are kind of two close ups of the painting. But yeah,
Speaker 7: it's a guy throwing decoys.
Speaker 5: Out that looks like a Terry Redlin.
Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, I definitely was heavily inspired
Speaker 7: as a kid, and now now I'm trying to figure
Speaker 7: out like.
Speaker 3: How to how to find my own path.
Speaker 7: And yeah, because I think, you know, he cared a
Speaker 7: lot about family, for community values, religion. It was clear
Speaker 7: and while you know, being in the outdoors and so
Speaker 7: he obviously accomplished a lot with that.
Speaker 3: People still talk about it.
Speaker 5: And I mean he got his own museum now.
Speaker 8: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I want.
Speaker 3: To bad Yeah, very very cool. Yeah, yeah, I've heard.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's there's a mostly half done painting of some
Speaker 1: big Bolsheviks man.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and I think the next one shows the full
Speaker 7: of what I'm working on.
Speaker 3: So that's on the easel currently.
Speaker 1: That's what you're working weigh on right now.
Speaker 13: And you do so you do like an underpainting, Yeah yeah,
Speaker 13: and so you know, like the underpainting is a lot
Speaker 13: that's like the most common question is why orange and
Speaker 13: why brown?
Speaker 7: And like, well, if you were to paint let's say,
Speaker 7: like a window and you held it up to a light,
Speaker 7: you'd obviously see the light.
Speaker 3: Coming through it.
Speaker 7: So you're not just seeing the paint, You're seeing what's
Speaker 7: bouncing off underneath. And the light that's coming back through it.
Speaker 7: So if it's a cold color or if it's white,
Speaker 7: it's going to change how you perceive the color.
Speaker 1: So what you're talking about is chuck something about then
Speaker 1: how to describe it?
Speaker 6: The underpainting.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a painting that's half done. And then but
Speaker 1: but instead of having like a white, instead of painting
Speaker 1: on a white canvas, you go through and make it orange.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And it depends what you're trying to accomplish. I
Speaker 7: really prefer like the warmth of that. But I mean
Speaker 7: that's like a cool nighttime scene. Some artists will want
Speaker 7: to do like a cooler color blue.
Speaker 5: So there's paint for the painting.
Speaker 1: You paint the canvas orange.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Oh that's where I've gotten wrong all these years.
Speaker 1: Start on white white?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 1: How old were you when you made your first painting?
Speaker 7: My mom has a finger painting framed from when I
Speaker 7: was like one and a half eighteen months or something.
Speaker 3: Like that, so she says, I started early, Okay, when
Speaker 3: did you start?
Speaker 1: For real?
Speaker 7: It progressed. I don't know if I could. I started painting.
Speaker 7: I mean I progressed through drawing my whole childhood, and
Speaker 7: then the colored pencils, and then I dove into painting
Speaker 7: when I really got interested in the duck snap because
Speaker 7: I kind of, oh, no, kid, you know, because you
Speaker 7: know that it's like, well, nothing but color has ever
Speaker 7: really won post nineteen fifty or something. So I knew
Speaker 7: I had to figure out how to paint and how
Speaker 7: to do color if I wanted to compete.
Speaker 3: So that I think it.
Speaker 7: Was twenty years old, twenty one, and I decided to
Speaker 7: pick up paints.
Speaker 6: Is this oil or acurlic?
Speaker 3: It's oil soil?
Speaker 1: Can you pick paying that picture over behind you? That's
Speaker 1: a work of art.
Speaker 2: How many.
Speaker 5: Ways can you paint? Like Kelsey said, oil, acrylic, there's watercolor.
Speaker 3: Watercolor, gash.
Speaker 7: Those are kind of the main ones. Yeah, Like there's
Speaker 7: not too many people, I don't think as artists.
Speaker 1: Can you guys critique this? This is? This is a
Speaker 1: paint a picture by Clay Nuke. It's a future man?
Speaker 4: Is that daytime or night time?
Speaker 1: Mid day? It's a future man? Or the machine gun
Speaker 1: like some kind of future space alien or the machine
Speaker 1: gun he's getting charged by a wild hog.
Speaker 3: That sums up my childhood artwork style.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, they're still hoping, so does if you
Speaker 1: if you didn't know anything about this artist, would you
Speaker 1: would you see a demonstration of raw talent or do
Speaker 1: you just see juvenile you?
Speaker 7: You know, I think it's like a combination of an
Speaker 7: unhealthy obsession and persistence.
Speaker 1: That ray bays in that picture.
Speaker 8: I'm giving that a oh that's out when I was looking.
Speaker 1: You know how little kids always have like what they draw.
Speaker 1: I would draw, uh, amphibious assaults, okay, And I would
Speaker 1: draw large large planes, Indian encampments. Oh so I'd do
Speaker 1: like a landscape, and then I would just fill it
Speaker 1: with teepees, lots.
Speaker 6: Of around both men. You'll find one of those, and.
Speaker 1: A signature, like a signature of my amphibious insalts would
Speaker 1: be I like to specialize in shattering glass. These amphibious
Speaker 1: vehicles I did had a window that was susceptible to
Speaker 1: an outward chatter for whatever reason, and that would denote
Speaker 1: like a certain amount of peril and gunplay happening, any
Speaker 1: amphibious assaults. But then I gave up on that, never
Speaker 1: did any more art done. Yeah, I don't know what
Speaker 1: was your thing when you were a kid.
Speaker 7: It was I mean, honestly, it was therapy for me
Speaker 7: because I hated being in the classroom.
Speaker 2: Huh.
Speaker 7: I mean I grew up in a with parents that
Speaker 7: had me outdoors from the very start. My parents were
Speaker 7: competitive archer archers, and so they had a bow and
Speaker 7: arrow in my hands since I was two.
Speaker 1: You were supposed to do that.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and then uh, you know, like going on canoe
Speaker 7: trips to the Canadian wilderness Quetico since I was six,
Speaker 7: And I mean that's just what like I was infatuated with.
Speaker 7: And then when I got to like kindergarten elementary, I
Speaker 7: hated everything about it and I struggled in school. Like socially,
Speaker 7: I did not have a great time making friends, and
Speaker 7: so to get through my days, I would just fill
Speaker 7: my notebooks with sketches. And that's I feel like where
Speaker 7: it started. And just like combat sketches or you doing
Speaker 7: wildlife everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and then and then it's like teacher caricatures.
Speaker 7: I started to focus more on wildlife when I got
Speaker 7: to like middle school, high school, and I would start
Speaker 7: to hand them out to my friends. So like all
Speaker 7: the lockers of friends I had would have like my
Speaker 7: drawings in there.
Speaker 3: And then I became known.
Speaker 7: As like the kid that did caricatures of the teachers
Speaker 7: in the back, and yeah.
Speaker 1: At what age were you known among your bodies as
Speaker 1: a like a good artist.
Speaker 7: I don't think until probably college that I really started
Speaker 7: to progress with it, because I mean it was just
Speaker 7: something I did just to get through my days prior
Speaker 7: to that. And then I'll never forget the senior year
Speaker 7: in high school. You know, you have like an art
Speaker 7: class that you can take, and they had given the
Speaker 7: students the opportunity to just do whatever you want to
Speaker 7: do for your final project. And I did like some
Speaker 7: duck hunters and a blind or something like that, and
Speaker 7: the teacher was like, you could sell that. When I
Speaker 7: was presenting it, and I remember all the kids were
Speaker 7: like eyebrows high, like giving me a nod, and I'm like,
Speaker 7: really like hung. So I opened an eBay account that
Speaker 7: next month, and so then we're out of school for
Speaker 7: the summer and I put a grizzly bear drawing on
Speaker 7: eBay and it sold for eighty bucks and that was
Speaker 7: the first time I made money of my art.
Speaker 1: And it was actually, you're kidding me.
Speaker 3: It was actually my mom's boss that bought it. But
Speaker 3: I mean that was it.
Speaker 7: That was like, I mean, game changer for me. Because
Speaker 7: then I realized like maybe I could do something with this,
Speaker 7: and at the time it was like I'm gonna do
Speaker 7: it on the side. That was my spending money in college.
Speaker 7: And I told my dad, I think first year after college,
Speaker 7: was like, can I just try this over the summer,
Speaker 7: And He's like, in the first month, if you can
Speaker 7: make as much as I think you could make, like
Speaker 7: doing landscaping you did the year prior, like, I'll let
Speaker 7: you do it, you know, and you can live at
Speaker 7: home or whatever. And so I did. I mean that's
Speaker 7: when I started heavy on pet portraits and I got
Speaker 7: enough pet portraits.
Speaker 6: How I made, you know, I made.
Speaker 7: Enough, and then that became kind of like the thing
Speaker 7: I did on the side ever since.
Speaker 1: So, so you when you were little, like looking back
Speaker 1: on it, you had an artist meant you were like
Speaker 1: an artist without knowing you were an artist.
Speaker 7: Sure, yeah, Like I was always attracted to it, whether
Speaker 7: I knew it or not. And it was never like
Speaker 7: super intentional, but it was just it was a form
Speaker 7: of expression. If I was a board, yeah, I just
Speaker 7: had to do something with my hands.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. Uh. Now do you selling galleries or mostly online?
Speaker 1: If people want to go look at your paintings. I mean,
Speaker 1: you got an awesome website.
Speaker 3: Yeah, think you.
Speaker 7: I mean it's all online right now. And that has
Speaker 7: just been the result of you know, when I moved here,
Speaker 7: I thought, maybe this is a great place to get
Speaker 7: involved in the art community. It seems like it's, you know,
Speaker 7: like a thriving art scene. And of course I had
Speaker 7: my resume was I was a wildlife tech and I
Speaker 7: love to paint, and that didn't fly with anybody, so
Speaker 7: I could not break into the scene. But then that
Speaker 7: pushed me to to really go on.
Speaker 1: You couldn't break into the art scene, yeah.
Speaker 5: Like galleries or anything like does it not going to
Speaker 5: art school or what was the reason?
Speaker 7: I mean, I think, I think. I think they do
Speaker 7: value of a resume a lot, for like in galleries,
Speaker 7: because I mean that's how they sell to people that
Speaker 7: don't know who the artists are in a gallery. I mean,
Speaker 7: they use It's not just a meritocracy, no, I it's it's.
Speaker 6: Near impossible for a budding artist to just walk into
Speaker 6: a gallery and get picked up. It happens, but they're
Speaker 6: looking for people that have had success at a show
Speaker 6: or like a lot of galleries will pick up an
Speaker 6: artist that is has a career.
Speaker 1: Rolling the gallery right right. I remember when I was
Speaker 1: starting out writing. I remember there's a writer that said
Speaker 1: to me, I don't remember what happened, like something I
Speaker 1: did or not. He goes, well, now you have like
Speaker 1: the stamp on your forehead.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Like what do you mean?
Speaker 1: He goes. You're like, you're now like, now everyone will
Speaker 1: take you seriously when you go to sell your work.
Speaker 6: You need to prove yourself a little bit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, He's like, but you can't. It doesn't matter what
Speaker 1: you write. You have to get up and get the stamp. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you're fine.
Speaker 6: That's pretty much it.
Speaker 1: But the damp's got to be there or else no
Speaker 1: one will even know. Your stuff could be great, but
Speaker 1: no one will know it because they don't see the stamp.
Speaker 6: Yeah. This is literally a big ass stamp.
Speaker 5: Ye.
Speaker 7: But I mean that that led me to push online,
Speaker 7: you know, and that that that was twenty fifteen and
Speaker 7: so Instagram.
Speaker 3: I was telling.
Speaker 7: Kelsey that was like the first year that it really
Speaker 7: started taking off, and so I started getting traction on.
Speaker 7: Basically I'd post anywhere I could on social media. When
Speaker 7: TikTok was musically, I saw some business guru online said
Speaker 7: you need a musically that's the future, and so I
Speaker 7: opened up a musically account, which was all just like
Speaker 7: twelve and thirteen year old kids singing and dancing, no
Speaker 7: idea what to do with it, and I like posted
Speaker 7: a couple like revealed videos of like, hey, this is
Speaker 7: my newest painting and put like some pop song onto it,
Speaker 7: and then it just took off, and then they changed
Speaker 7: to TikTok, and then TikTok became like the biggest way
Speaker 7: to gain new clients for me in like previous like
Speaker 7: recent years.
Speaker 1: So when they keep talking about banning TikTok, you're sweating that.
Speaker 7: I mean, I've diversified enough where I you know, and
Speaker 7: I know how to do it now.
Speaker 3: Like if it's not that, and it's the next thing.
Speaker 1: Those Chinese spying on your dunt painting?
Speaker 3: Does this name graceful anticipation?
Speaker 1: What's the anticipating Max Max taking Max jump shooting them?
Speaker 7: So the story, like Max said, the video I posted
Speaker 7: of us going out and that back then, I was
Speaker 7: just I love fiddling around with cameras and so I
Speaker 7: was just gathering videos and of course I love to
Speaker 7: video birds and stuff too. So when we had found
Speaker 7: this drake on this small pothole walking out every morning.
Speaker 7: We set up on it on the last morning, and
Speaker 7: it was very evident after sitting there that morning that
Speaker 7: he would just be there right away at first light,
Speaker 7: and he would sit there and whistle shake the water
Speaker 7: until the hen showed up. And then the hen would
Speaker 7: show up, they'd go in the grass and do their thing,
Speaker 7: and then they'd be gone for the day and you'd
Speaker 7: never see him again. So he's waiting for the hen
Speaker 7: to arrive. On the stamp, the carrier design is the
Speaker 7: moment that the hen is arriving. So the carrier painting
Speaker 7: full circle. Yeah, so graceful anticipation. And then the carrier
Speaker 7: paintings is titled the Arrival.
Speaker 5: Wow, that's creative.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know Kelsey has a gallery. Yeah, I know, studio gallery.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I have yet to walk in.
Speaker 1: Probably she might reject you, but maybe now ye stamp,
Speaker 1: maybe I am, but maybe I do have some space.
Speaker 7: It's I mean, it's a tough balance because now I've
Speaker 7: established myself among many of of clients and collectors that
Speaker 7: I know personally, and I get the prices that I want.
Speaker 7: But then most galleries, if you do get in and
Speaker 7: they want fifty So then now how do you how
Speaker 7: do you juggle that? I mean, do you double your prices?
Speaker 7: Because that doesn't seem you know, very moral and so yeah,
Speaker 7: so it's yeah.
Speaker 1: Do you have competitive terms at your gallery actually a
Speaker 1: broker relationships.
Speaker 6: I moved the gallery away from a collaborative space to
Speaker 6: all my own stuff now, so it's yeah, it's it's
Speaker 6: back to just.
Speaker 1: So studio galerries just you know this, Yeah, that's all
Speaker 1: just because you need more space.
Speaker 6: No, it's just I found that I brought in a
Speaker 6: caliber of artists that deserved a different space. Like I'm
Speaker 6: in three fourks. It's there's not exactly a huge art market.
Speaker 6: When people come to my studio and my gallery, they're
Speaker 6: there to see my work, and I was watching these
Speaker 6: amazing works to get a little overlooked. And you know,
Speaker 6: we had some great success there with the other artists,
Speaker 6: but they just and many of them have gone on
Speaker 6: to get in like big gallery. So it just was
Speaker 6: like so good for them, I think, But it was
Speaker 6: a great experience.
Speaker 1: And so studio a gallery as you can go, you'll
Speaker 1: be their working Yeah, yeah, and people can come see
Speaker 1: your work there. Yep.
Speaker 6: I'm open, you know, five days a week, and I'm
Speaker 6: in there painting. You walk in, you see what I'm
Speaker 6: working on, and then you can walk through and see
Speaker 6: the rest of my works.
Speaker 3: Pretty fun.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that's what I need. I'm in a spare bedroom stuff.
Speaker 1: Well, man, I appreciate you coming on the show, dude.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 1: You know what, we were right when it came out
Speaker 1: in the news, like, I don't know the hell when
Speaker 1: would have come out in the news, late September. Right away, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Krinn and I were like, man, we should get the
Speaker 1: guy that the Montana guy that won the duck stamp.
Speaker 1: But then Krin's like, we should wait till people start
Speaker 1: buying their ducks, you know. So we actually talked about
Speaker 1: doing this back then, but then Krinn was pointed out
Speaker 1: rightfully that no one can go get it. If you
Speaker 1: do it later, it'll be that it's like in your
Speaker 1: wallet and you can pull it out of your wallet
Speaker 1: and be like, oh yeah shit, yeah, is a person
Speaker 1: a person painted that?
Speaker 3: Great timing?
Speaker 1: Yeah, like an artist who's trying to make it as
Speaker 1: an artist painted that. I'm gonna go get mine right
Speaker 1: after this dude fired up.
Speaker 7: Now, Yeah, can I just give a shout out to
Speaker 7: the Junior Stamp contest because I know Karin mentioned it earlier.
Speaker 7: That's been a huge passion of mine because I'm sure
Speaker 7: a lot of your thought is how to bridge the
Speaker 7: gap and I think you've probably done a very good
Speaker 7: job at that between people that don't understand conservation and
Speaker 7: hunting and people that do, and how to, you know,
Speaker 7: how to connect with both audiences and the Junior Stamp.
Speaker 7: I got involved twelve years ago or so at the
Speaker 7: Prairie Wetlands Learning Center Fergus Falls, Minnesota. And that's a
Speaker 7: it's a US Fish and Wildlife Service facility that's incorporated
Speaker 7: into the local K through twelve district, And so the
Speaker 7: kids spent half of their school year on a WMA
Speaker 7: and they basically everything that they learn is centered around
Speaker 7: the outdoors and conservation and kind of like intertwined.
Speaker 3: And so they have the kids.
Speaker 7: One of the big projects is they have all their
Speaker 7: students enter the Junior Duck Stamp and then they write
Speaker 7: a paper on the bird species they chose. And so
Speaker 7: that I work there one season at the Wetland Management District,
Speaker 7: and so they asked me, like, hey, would you know
Speaker 7: they knew that I was always entering the duck stamp,
Speaker 7: would you speak to the kids and get involved? And
Speaker 7: so I did like a presentation, and that now has
Speaker 7: become a tradition that I do every year coo, and
Speaker 7: it's been really it, you know, I now I realize
Speaker 7: the impact that this program has. I mean a lot
Speaker 7: of these kids, just like Emily, have no background. They're
Speaker 7: just that's just what you know. They're just there for
Speaker 7: K through twelve education. But after I come and present,
Speaker 7: they do their painting. I mean, they send me a
Speaker 7: stack of note cards at the end of the year
Speaker 7: of just thank you notes, and then they draw me.
Speaker 7: Each student draws me like a hundred and some students
Speaker 7: draw me their own duck and mail.
Speaker 3: Them to me like this whole packet.
Speaker 1: Every year.
Speaker 3: The teacher said that a couple.
Speaker 7: Of them chose their final project or just write it
Speaker 7: on myself, which I'm like, well it's but like I'm
Speaker 7: just there one day and I'm showing them artwork and
Speaker 7: talking them about the duck stamp, and they just become
Speaker 7: addicted to it and like so this is a government
Speaker 7: sponsored program that very few people participate in, and the
Speaker 7: you know, when you think about how many classrooms and
Speaker 7: students are out there that is designed to do just that,
Speaker 7: bridge the gap and teach young individuals about conservation. That
Speaker 7: mean kids love. To me, two things are like true
Speaker 7: passion as a kid, you love artwork, and you love stories.
Speaker 7: And you know, kids love the doodle play with materials.
Speaker 7: And then I mean it's whether you're watching a movie
Speaker 7: or cartoons like it's this. You know, kids love stories
Speaker 7: and the story of the duck stamp, the history of
Speaker 7: the program is a really fantastic story. And so they
Speaker 7: you know, that is taught in their experience of participating
Speaker 7: in the Junior Stamp program. And I mean, I would
Speaker 7: just I think we need to encourage a lot more parents.
Speaker 7: I mean, whether you're a teacher like Emily's teacher getting
Speaker 7: your kids your students involved, or whether you're just a
Speaker 7: parent and want to get your kids involved.
Speaker 3: Anybody can do it.
Speaker 7: You can get the packet online and get started and
Speaker 7: you know, submit a painting.
Speaker 1: We should have put that in the Kids Activity book
Speaker 1: Man Catch Crayfish count Stars. Should have had a thing
Speaker 1: like submit your duck stamp book.
Speaker 6: Two.
Speaker 4: You can encourage that.
Speaker 1: Start kicking that one teacher's ass a little bit sending
Speaker 1: some kids over there to compete. All right, so you can't.
Speaker 1: You can't do one for three years? You got to
Speaker 1: sit out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, twenty twenty seven.
Speaker 5: Do you know what the ducks are for your twenty
Speaker 5: twenty seven?
Speaker 3: I think they released this coming year?
Speaker 6: Okay, yeah, starts gaming?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah? Are you gonna spend three years working on it? No?
Speaker 1: Do you live it? How long? So the next time
Speaker 1: you can submit, are you gonna limit yourself to how
Speaker 1: much time you can spend on it?
Speaker 7: I had already started doing that just because I mean,
Speaker 7: like I said earlier, just the practicality of it. I mean,
Speaker 7: it's the end of the day, it's just a contest
Speaker 7: and a gamble, you know, you just put in and
Speaker 7: cross your fingers. So yeah, I mean, I I want
Speaker 7: to say I spent three weeks of like total commitment
Speaker 7: on this year's I mean, but I mean that's night
Speaker 7: and day, I mean seven days a week.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how many hours? How many hours do you have
Speaker 1: into that painting? If you had to take a stab?
Speaker 7: Uh, the painting itself was probably twelve days. But I
Speaker 7: mean that's wearing sweats and looking like cramp round the clock.
Speaker 7: So I don't know, twelve times ten twelve hours a
Speaker 7: day and then they're you know, the planning and actually
Speaker 7: going out and getting reference. I mean all adds up
Speaker 7: to a huge commitment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well paid off man, it did. Yeah yeah, congratulations.
Speaker 3: You can't wait to see your next one.
Speaker 6: Well deserved.
Speaker 1: I like any kind of story about American elbow grease man, yep,
Speaker 1: And that's this is all about making a plan, like
Speaker 1: having a dream, working on it struggles, Yeah, overcoming all
Speaker 1: that ship.
Speaker 3: Right, and it feels like maybe there's a chance.
Speaker 1: There's a chance, man, there's a chance. I can tell
Speaker 1: you got Yeah, you're devoted. Thank you, you know, thanks
Speaker 1: for coming on the show with Shuck Black and Kelsey
Speaker 1: neanxt for coming on the show. Go pay Kelsey visit
Speaker 1: at Studio Gallery Three Forks, Montana.
Speaker 6: I'm actually I have some stuff in the Mediator store
Speaker 6: now too, you do.
Speaker 1: Yeah, man, I've been writing so much about Three Forks
Speaker 1: because we're working on the next Meat Eaters American History,
Speaker 1: which is the story of the Mountain Men.
Speaker 6: Lots going on.
Speaker 1: I can't get a paragraph without having to talk about
Speaker 1: Three Forks. A ton lot went on there. Yeah, God,
Speaker 1: the mono dudes just bit the dust around three forks.
Speaker 6: Yeah, we were. We went on SETH and I went
Speaker 6: on a little walk the other day and we came
Speaker 6: across a little plaque about Colter's run, and there's just
Speaker 6: like pretty much everywhere you look, there's little things like that.
Speaker 1: Oh listen, he a lot of dudes bit the dust
Speaker 1: around three forks, and not always in a pretty way. No,
Speaker 1: but what you when you're reading about Culter, what is
Speaker 1: often omitted is what happened to the guy he was with.
Speaker 6: He got killed, right.
Speaker 1: Not just killed, chopped up, and then Colter was smeared
Speaker 1: in his innards.
Speaker 3: Oh god, sounds like a podcast.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well it is. It's Media's American History The Mountain Book.
Speaker 1: Yeah you'll get the full, Yeah, brutal, the full on
Speaker 1: the bridge. And then there's a so check this out.
Speaker 1: This is a little preyler to so Media's American History
Speaker 1: the Mountain I'm working out now, but this is dude.
Speaker 1: So this one group of trappers is going up river,
Speaker 1: this group Mountain is going up river and one of
Speaker 1: the guys get second thoughts and bales and they take
Speaker 1: this this the head of this group of trappers takes
Speaker 1: another trapper who was actually a Lewis. John Colter was
Speaker 1: Lewis and Clark alumni. John Potts, who Colter's enterds got
Speaker 1: smeared on, was a Lewis and Clark alumni. And there's
Speaker 1: this guy I don't know how to pronounce his name,
Speaker 1: like Dreillard or Drew Llard. Yeah, he was a Lewis
Speaker 1: and Clark alumni. So this one trapper splits and the
Speaker 1: head of the expedition says, hey, go find him and
Speaker 1: bring him to me, dead or alive.
Speaker 3: Go trap him.
Speaker 1: He goes, catches up to him, shoots him in the
Speaker 1: back between the shoulder blades, hauls him back to camp.
Speaker 1: They say, you shouldn't have tried to do that. They
Speaker 1: stick them in the canoe and float them down river.
Speaker 1: He washes up dead downriver on the beach. Then his
Speaker 1: killer winds up dead, chopped up head setting on his
Speaker 1: horse in Three Forks.
Speaker 6: Remember for that one. I'm just.
Speaker 1: A whole big part of the story of the Mountain
Speaker 1: Men is them getting over like that era, them getting
Speaker 1: over the idea of the three Forks and moving south
Speaker 1: because Lewis and Clark when they came through, they saw
Speaker 1: so much. They spent a lot of time there and
Speaker 1: They're like, there's a shipload of beavers there. And so
Speaker 1: it was like this they were very focused on when
Speaker 1: we got to get to that area, because they talked
Speaker 1: about how much how many beavers are in the area,
Speaker 1: and they kept going there and the Blackfeet for a
Speaker 1: long time or like they want nothing to do with this.
Speaker 1: They didn't want to enter the fur trade with the Americans.
Speaker 1: They didn't want Americans in their area. And they're like
Speaker 1: just very forcefully saying, do not come into our area.
Speaker 1: You know, they said it politely, they said it not
Speaker 1: so polightly. And eventually they like these trappers trying to
Speaker 1: come out or kind of like eventually they got legit,
Speaker 1: gave up, oh and move south and that kind of
Speaker 1: launched sort of like this heyday of the Mountain then.
Speaker 1: But they were always drawn like a moth to flames
Speaker 1: to the three fok dude, and you go there and
Speaker 1: bad shit happens.
Speaker 6: Now there's a little art glory.
Speaker 1: Now you go there and pay attention to go ahead,
Speaker 1: visit the studio. Lot's changed in the West.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I guess.
Speaker 1: All right, Thanks guys, appreciate you coming up. Go buy
Speaker 1: your duckt stamp yep.
Speaker 14: Uh so no, we've got a day left. We're gonna
Speaker 14: do everything everything we can in our power to make
Speaker 14: this happen, all of us, everybody here on on the side.
Speaker 14: Like I said, it feels a little cooler. We got
Speaker 14: some cloud cover which was like the great day we
Speaker 14: had that, so really excited for tonight.
Speaker 3: But let's switch gears a little.
Speaker 14: Bit and get into Luke Comb's hunting and how it
Speaker 14: kind of ties into some of your music, and you know,
Speaker 14: you're starting to get more and more references in your
Speaker 14: song lyrics that you mentioned. It's becoming a bigger, you know,
Speaker 14: a piece of your life. You're keeping a and maybe
Speaker 14: it's too personal. This can get cut out, like keeping
Speaker 14: a diary for your kids, like just a hunting journal.
Speaker 1: So what does honey mean to you? When did you start?
Speaker 14: Kind of give us a little background on that and
Speaker 14: just in general.
Speaker 10: Yeah, I really started, I don't know, I guess probably
Speaker 10: eight years ago now and have just been kind of
Speaker 10: have just become obsessed with it, you know really, you
Speaker 10: know obviously my you know, my what I do for
Speaker 10: a living is very sensory overload, you know what I mean.
Speaker 10: Like it's just a lot of one place to the
Speaker 10: next to this place, to that place, and in this
Speaker 10: car and in to this place and doing interviews and
Speaker 10: doing photo shoots and shoot music videos and in the
Speaker 10: studio and writing songs and it never ends, you know.
Speaker 10: So I think these trips for me, you know, hunting
Speaker 10: started out as a way to kind of it's the
Speaker 10: complete antithesis of that, right, Like it does ultimately, it
Speaker 10: does culminate with some super climax, high intensity moment if
Speaker 10: everything goes right. But like the lead up, you know,
Speaker 10: it's like everything about it is very I don't know,
Speaker 10: there's a lot of calming elements too, like the whole process, right,
Speaker 10: Like you know, I like if you're pumped to go
Speaker 10: hunting to shoot an animal, it's like you're I mean, yeah,
Speaker 10: that's the end goal, but it's like just there would
Speaker 10: you would leave feeling empty if you showed up and
Speaker 10: then you shot an animal and that was the end
Speaker 10: and it all ended right, like, you know, spending time
Speaker 10: outside and being with you know, like minded people. And
Speaker 10: I've also learned a tremendous amount of life lessons from
Speaker 10: being out here, right, you know. I was talking with
Speaker 10: you earlier when we were in the tent, when this
Speaker 10: was all getting set up and talking about how, you know,
Speaker 10: the music stuff for me has always come really naturally,
Speaker 10: you know, and not that it wasn't you know, really difficult,
Speaker 10: and that it's not a lot of work, and it
Speaker 10: is all that, but it's never felt like I never
Speaker 10: felt like I had a lot to overcome in the
Speaker 10: sense of and I guess that I did, but it
Speaker 10: just never felt that way.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 10: It's something that I was naturally good at, and I
Speaker 10: really always believed in myself and my ability to do that,
Speaker 10: and and once I decided I was going to do
Speaker 10: that for a living, it seemed like I didn't really
Speaker 10: hit a lot of setbacks, you know, just the way
Speaker 10: my story kind of played out.
Speaker 2: I'm very thankful for that.
Speaker 10: I'm very lucky, but you know, I'm you know, we've
Speaker 10: talked about a little bit on this trip that I'm
Speaker 10: gonna just sawing a bit of a cold streak in
Speaker 10: the woods man like like the bull dropping. And you know,
Speaker 10: I've I've had some some other hunts that just kind
Speaker 10: of everything You do everything the right way and then
Speaker 10: it doesn't work out, you know, the way that that
Speaker 10: it's supposed to, And I mean even down to the
Speaker 10: you know, the eleventh hour.
Speaker 2: You know, like I've had stuff recently.
Speaker 10: Where I'm like, we're already celebrating and then it's it
Speaker 10: doesn't go away that you think that it's going to go.
Speaker 10: And so I've learned a lot through those experiences, right
Speaker 10: that that not you know, just because you do everything
Speaker 10: you can, and you you prepare the best that you
Speaker 10: possibly can, and you do everything you feel like the
Speaker 10: right way, and you're coming on these you know, public
Speaker 10: land hunts, and you know, I could probably afford to
Speaker 10: go do whatever hunt I wanted to, but I don't
Speaker 10: want to do that. You know, I want I want
Speaker 10: it to be a challenge. I want it to be difficult.
Speaker 10: I want there to be you know, I want it
Speaker 10: to be you know, I don't can't say I want
Speaker 10: to go hike to the top of the Himalayan mountains,
Speaker 10: but you know what I mean, Like, I don't want
Speaker 10: it to be I don't want to just sit in
Speaker 10: in front of a you know, in front of a
Speaker 10: big pile of apples and they go, well that's you know,
Speaker 10: this is you know, Razor Blade's going to walk out
Speaker 10: in five minutes.
Speaker 2: You know what I mean, And you're gonna shoot that.
Speaker 2: It's like, I'm just not interested in that, you know.
Speaker 10: So, but yeah, I keep that journal, man, and it
Speaker 10: helps me kind of and especially through this, through this
Speaker 10: kind of last year. I guess that's it's been really
Speaker 10: tough for me, at least big game wise, it's been.
Speaker 10: It's been tough for me. I've had a great Turkey
Speaker 10: season this year. I'm thankful for that.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 10: You know, Turkey Woods seems like the only thing that
Speaker 10: keep me coming back right now. You know, it hasn't
Speaker 10: been a lot of hasn't hasn't been a lot of
Speaker 10: good outcomes anywhere else. But I keep that journal really,
Speaker 10: you know, I me and my friends talk about it
Speaker 10: a lot. That I go hunting with you know, Dan
Speaker 10: and Read they have a podcast through Meet And I've
Speaker 10: been hunting with those guys for years and they're some
Speaker 10: of my best friends. And you know, they grew up
Speaker 10: hunting and their dad hunts, and so they're like, man,
Speaker 10: I just I wish I had I wish my dad
Speaker 10: would have done that.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: I wish I could go back and read all my.
Speaker 10: Dad's you know, the days that he was miserable and
Speaker 10: the days that he was you know, that he got
Speaker 10: the biggest year of his life. I wish I could
Speaker 10: have all that stuff, you know, And so my wife
Speaker 10: bought me that book a few years ago for Christmas,
Speaker 10: I think around twenty nineteen. And just this Elkhunt's going
Speaker 10: to be the last pages of my first first journal.
Speaker 2: That will be completely filled up.
Speaker 10: Uh So I'm excited about about starting the next one
Speaker 10: and and hopefully we can get we can get.
Speaker 2: Something done, and there'll be something good in the end
Speaker 2: of that one.
Speaker 1: You know, we're gonna do everything we can. Mm hmmm
Speaker 1: mm hmmmmmmmmmm
Speaker 12: Mm hmm