Dali House

All that meat in the last post got me thinking about artists of another order who turn carcasses into wall-mountable decoration. But I’m warning anyone who might share my curiosity about taxidermy that, unless you’re willing to shell out a bundle for some very genre-specific apparatus, it’s a closed shop.

And don’t ever mention Tony Perkins in “Psycho”. Taxidermists are a touchy bunch. I’m guessing they all wanted to be surgeons at some point and this is as far as life let them get with a knife.

But there is certainly an art to their trade and, quite unlike the antagonists of “Silence of the Lambs” and “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, these people are very helpful – once you’ve actually bought your equipment. Websites like Taxidermy.net offer loads of advice to rookies.

I was naive enough to think that once you’d shot your bighorn sheep or bison and dragged it into your garage, it was just a matter of gutting it, drying it out and stuffing it with enough kapok and wadded-up newspaper to get it standing up on its own legs again.

I realised a lot of preservative chemicals would be involved, and you’d probably need some glass eyeballs, but that was it.

But no, everything’s got to be more complicated than it seems. You need special mounts – urethane mannequins (”mannikins”, the website above spells it) that already look like the animal you’re going to jam them inside of. These used to be made from the original bones and lumber, with the curves of the muscles sculpted out in clay or mache, but now the anatomically accurate moulds are bought online or in massive retail outlets in western North America, where all the big game is.

So you’ve got your former mammal and a mannikin that looks just like it (almost good enough to hang on the wall as is, to be honest), and now you get to strip the skin off carefully and tan it with chemicals. Then you pop in the glass eyes and attach natural antlers (if it’s supposed to have antlers or you’re building a jackalope from a bunny you shot). Presumably they still use the given ivory when a rhino or elephant’s been felled.

You sew it all up, groom the fur or hair, and set it aside to dry. Then you get started on restoring the natural colours with special paints, maybe a little extra blush, and fixing any parts that have shrunk or collapsed with wax or “epoxy sculpting compounds”.

“Many taxidermists use a combination of techniques on a deer head, painting the ear interiors with an airbrush while finishing the lips, nose and eyes with oil paints and a brush,” Taxidermy.net says.

This cougar and play display won Mark Smart of Great Falls, Montana, a trophy at a state taxidermists’ association convention in 1996, and the bison and bear sharing the shower with Janet Leigh at the top of this post also award-winners, by Joseph Lesh of Texas and Jody Slusher of North Dakota, respectively.

In the website’s forum, a beginner asks for “any tips on finishing a bear nose … It’s for a rug”. This brings a thoughtful reply about using Apoxie and a terrycloth towel for texturing it, and the recommendation that, “when you paint the nose, start from the inside and work out. I use gill red in the very back. Then I use flesh to tone down the red as I move out of the nose. Then I use Payne’s grey to blend back over the flesh and I’ll paint the nose with it just to subdue the pink in the ‘wings’ of the nose.

“Finally, I take black and finish the rest of the paint keeping the outside edges solid black yet allowing it to blend quickly into the Payne’s grey on the interior nose. That’s just how I do it.” He sounds like my old TV art teacher Jon Gnagy.

A hundred years ago you wouldn’t get anyone being this nice to you, even if there had been an Internet. You’d have some furniture maker giving you a dirty look because you just hauled a bloody moose head into his upholstering shop. But you’d offer him an ounce of gold and he’d get stuffing, quite literally, with rags and cotton.

“This practice produced some terrible looking mounts and gave taxidermy a bad reputation which still haunts the industry to this day,” the website grumbles. “Professional taxidermists still shudder and take offence at the term stuffing. (The preferred word is mounting.)

“Taxidermy in the latter part of the 20th century has developed into a full-fledged form of wildlife art, and the successful taxidermists of today must also be considered as fine artists in their own right.”

It’s not all sweetness and light umber, of course. In its menu of tutorials, the website delves into the thorny issues of “Trapped Air Removal”, “Removing Ear Cartilage”, “Horn Degreasing”, “Bear Change-Out Heads”, “Flexible Tail Installation”, taking “the headache and guesswork out of eye setting” and, talk about your modern marvels, “Using the FatVac”.

Something else I didn’t know about taxidermy: It’s not just a phenomenon of the American wilderness.

Wikipedia has a link to one George C Jamieson of Edinburgh, “who has been at the forefront of Scottish work since 1974″ and, according to Jamieson’s own website, “will do a dog for £650 to £1,500″.

And over at Taxidermy.co.uk, Mike Gadd of Yorkshire does amazing things with roadkill – an otter, for example – starting from £500.