The Wild Duck Chase by Martin J. Smith

Author:Martin J. Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Walker Books
Published: 2012-07-31T16:00:00+00:00

“My wife says I overanalyze,” Scot Storm says, and it’s easy to believe as the amiable onetime North Dakota State University wrestler and former architect moves around the thousand-square-foot studio of his rural Freeport, Minnesota, home. He sets down his coffee cup and moves toward a painting on a far wall, a horizontal canvas showing more than a dozen pintail ducks in flight over a reedy marsh. He grabs a ruler and a straightedge and, gesturing at different places on the canvas, explains how he applies “the rule of thirds” to organizing the areas of darkness and light in his paintings, and how he triangulates a canvas to identify the painting’s focal point.

“In this case I decided on pintails. I know the landscape is heavily weighted over here, and I wanted something to weight the painting here, so I wanted my main subject over here just in a preliminary sense. So I’ll lay in a diagonal line like this on the top, and from that diagonal line I’ll go up from the bottom corner and intersect it at a ninety-degree angle.”

He concedes that his analytical approach to composition “may have been something I picked up in architecture. But I’m sure there are others that use it.”

At this moment in April 2010, these rules of composition are the only aspects of his 2010 Federal Duck Stamp Contest entry about which he is certain. Having won the contest in 2003 with an entry featuring a pair of flying redheads, and having finished second in 2009 with a striking painting of swimming wood ducks, Storm finds himself, less than four months before the August deadline, with lingering doubts about which species he’ll paint.

“I’m ninety-five percent sure it’s Canada geese,” he says. “But I’m vacillating between that and northern shovelers.”

Storm understands the stakes as well as anyone. His previous win triggered an avalanche of interest in his work, making possible a move from his family’s starter home in Sartell to their larger and more comfortable home in Freeport, “the city with a smile,” whose 565 residents don’t necessarily mind being a nearly two-hour drive from the urban center of Minneapolis. The Storms’ new house sits on four acres and is an idyllic place for Scot and Kris to raise their twelve-year-old twins, as well as two Labrador retrievers and an ambitious Maltese named Brutus Maximus. Once confined to a work space measuring seven and a half by twelve feet and jammed with his painting desk, bookshelves, a formatting printer, and his computer, Storm now paints at a drafting table bathed in light from two windows, one of which overlooks a pond where he has built a blind from which he can photograph the waterfowl that use his property as a way station. The house also has enough garage space for three vehicles and a production and warehousing area where Scot makes his own prints and Kris still runs the business. Photos of all four family members in camouflage hunting clothes hang on a studio wall.

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