RD's Art - Scrimshaw of Oreo and Nick's Bear

 

Bones became a big interest for RD at some point. He collected them obsessively. I remember a vacation we took in 1976 up to the Pacific Northwest, through Wyoming, Yellowstone, across southern Montana, up into central Washington, our goal The Spokane Indian Reservation at Wellpinit, Washington where I had lived as a child in 1955. All along the way, both going and coming home, RD collected roadkill and threw it into the trunk of our rental car! Our son was eight years old and thought it was pretty cool that his dad often pulled the car over when he spotted small dead animals along the highway, picked them up and showed us what he’d found before he stored them in the trunk.

RD learned to clean the skulls and skeletons of small delicate animals for use in his artwork by letting death beetles (Dermestid Beetles) do the work of eating all the flesh, leaving only bone. He would take the bone outside, lay it on the ground, cover it with a bucket and place a heavy rock on top of the overturned bucket. Sometimes it took several months before the bone was clean.

And he studied the bone density of different animals to decide which ones lent themselves to grinding, drilling, and delicate scrollwork. I remember when he sent me to a meat processing facility in Loveland for some wild game bones for they are denser than domestic animals, better for his purposes.

For RD, the learning process is what it’s all about. Before the Internet, and most of these art projects I am writing about took place from 1975-1995, he read a lot of books, took a few classes at CSU, and experimented with techniques. I love to find his notebooks filled with pages of writing, often illustrated with red pencil drawings. Using animal bones, antlers, and horns RD made jewelry, knife handles, scrimshaw, and more. This blog post is about scrimshaw.

We had a neighbor on Highway 1 who raised longhorn cattle and grew hay. He and RD had a little history together back in the 1960s when they both worked for Bartran Homes. One day when RD went to buy hay this rancher proudly introduced him to his favorite steer named Oreo, a big, handsome Longhorn steer. 

 

 

He assured RD the steer was friendly and could be trusted, but RD, who had years of experience moving his dad's herd from field to field when he was still a boy, recognized a big longhorn steer with an attitude. Sure enough, within a few days he learned that Oreo had tried to hook the rancher with one of those deadly horns and was now headed to the meat locker. RD bought half of that beef and from the flat shoulder bones created two pieces of delicately carved and inked art, forever commemorating Oreo. The year was 1988.

The next piece featured here is the skull of a bear killed by one of RD’s friends, Nick Chenoweth. Nick lived up the Poudre River Canyon at that time and a bear was getting into this trash. RD tells me that Nick was within his rights as a homeowner to shoot and kill the bear but when he told about it at the Charco Broiler over morning coffee the waitresses were not at all happy with Nick. RD took the skull home and cleaned it up and prepared it for the delicate scrimshaw work. It was a wonderful piece and I’m sorry the only photo we have of it does not really do it justice. On the left of the photo we see Nick aiming his rifle at the marauding bear in front of him. 

Nick and RD continued to be friends for years and when RD decided he wanted horses he got three of them from Nick’s herd. Unfortunately, Nick died young with early onset Alzheimer’s disease.