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PrintCARVER OF WOOD, CARVER OF AIR
Award-winning wildfowl artist Dan Burgette interprets birds, motion, and wind
Photography by W. Garth Dowling
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Ihis shop nestled in the hills outside of Tetonia, Dan Burgette applies a deft hand to the wing feathers of a Red Crossbill for a piece titled Teton Crossbills.
“Painting is still intimidating, still a real challenge,” he says. “But I’m getting better at it.”
Ever the perfectionist, Burgette started the piece while an artist-in-residence at the National Museum of Wildlife Art in 2009. Teton Crossbills is destined for this year’s Ward World Wildfowl Carving Championship in Maryland, a competition held in late April.
Burgette has found success at this “granddaddy of wildfowl carving competitions,” taking Best in World, Interpretive Wood Sculpture in 2001, and a third place in the same category last year.
Using a variety of materials including metal, he strives to resolve one of the major problems of wildfowl carving—how to support birds in flight.
“Often you end up with basically a bird on a stick,” Burgette says. “I was trying to get away from that and so I tried to envisage air currents and air molecules as they get disturbed as the bird flies along.”
Several of his pieces have a flying bird supported by wood or metal ribbons representing the air currents made by the passing wildfowl. To Burgette these “ribbony things” give the viewer a notion of the bird’s direction and speed. The swift, raven, or falcon is no longer a bird on a stick but a graceful missile streaking through the sky.
To make those ribbons thin enough and strong enough, the carver started exploring the use of metal in the early 1990s with a Jackson blacksmith. “He was great because he’d turn me loose in his shop, and he’d do the welding because I didn’t know how to weld,” Burgette says. “But other than that, he’d let me forge, use his anvils and all that stuff.”
Burgette worked for the National Park Service for twenty-seven years; his carving career started modestly enough at George Rogers Clark National Historical Park in Vincennes, Indiana. One of his duties there was to dress as a frontiersman, whittle under a tree, and talk to tourists about the Revolutionary War. Upon seeing a duck decoy made with a chainsaw on the West Coast, Burgette decided to try to carve one with a tomahawk.
