Anderson: Minnesota wildlife artist Bob Hautman captures the world in broad strokes

The other day Bob Hautman turned on one light, then another, curious whether the change in luminescence affected the mien, or appearance, of the ducks he was painting.

This was at the farm-turned-wildlife mecca west of the Twin Cities that Hautman shares with his wife, the artist Dodie Logue, and Hautman was putting the finishing touches on his 2024 Federal Duck Stamp entry.

Hautman, of course, is one of the three famous Hautman brothers — the others are Joe and Jim — who have won the Federal Duck Stamp contest a record 15 times. A familial tally that will never be broken, unless, as I've noted previously, the brothers clone themselves.

On this day, Bob's studio is comfortable, with no need to fire up its wood-burning stove. A one-time hen house, the studio looks out over a small wetland and, beyond it, a grassy lowland that is an occasional home to wood ducks, red-winged black birds, deer and other critters. Bearing the cadence of art itself, the studio is a comfortable place, taking its own time.

"I have worked in oil and acrylic, but for the last 10 years or so I've painted in gouache, which is sort of a cross between acrylic and a water color," Bob said. "Some oils can take a year to dry, while acrylic dries quickly. Gouache, I can move around for an hour or so after I paint it."

Bob, Jim and Joe are among seven kids born to Elaine and Tuck Hautman of St. Louis Park. Elaine was a professional artist and Tuck also dabbled in painting, channeling for inspiration the many duck hunts he made to Leech Lake.

Always creative, Bob as a kid was most interested in pottery, and in school he stayed after class to shape clay into bowls and cups. If the time he had spent over a potter's wheel had paid the bills, he might still be spinning clay today.

Instead, after high school, he and Jim started swinging hammers, roofing, until one day they noticed their mom was selling driftwood pieces on which she painted ducks.

"Jim and I figured we could do that, and we started painting ducks on driftwood, too," Bob said. "Then one day, Mom told us about this thing called the duck stamp contest."

Older brother Joe, meanwhile, had already gone off to college, en route to a doctorate in theoretical physics. Art interested him plenty, and he was talented with a brush. But the science of motion, matter and energy beguiled him, and anyway, physics seemed like a more grown-up thing to do than paint.

"That changed when Jim won his first Federal Duck Stamp in 1990 at age 25, the youngest artist to win it," Bob said. "Jim's painting was of a black-bellied whistling duck, then Joe followed in 1992 with a winning painting of a spectacled eider."

At the time, the notion that two brothers could win the prestigious competition nearly back to back was unthinkable, and Joe's entry drew suspicion from artists who believed Jim had actually painted it.

"So after the judging, a couple of artists casually asked Joe to sketch something, to see if he actually could," Bob said.

Prolific with pen, pencil or brush, Joe could have composed wildlife scenes until the cows came home, as it were. But a few doodles settled the question, and the Hautman brothers' record-setting stamp wins — Bob, for example, would follow with victories in 1997, 2001 and 2018 — had begun.

So it was the other day at his farm-turned-wildlife mecca that Bob was tidying up his most recent entry to the big stamp contest. The deadline was near, and the two flighted ducks he had composed in nuanced hues evoked — in detail and composite — art's inherent mystery.

Still, as he flicked lights on and off, cocking his head to one side as he did, he touched up a breast feather here and a tail feather there, knowing that even after he mailed his finished product, in his mind's eye he would still be swirling colors onto canvas, racing toward a finish line that never really comes.

Little about this process has changed for the Hautman boys over the years. The business of wildlife art, by contrast, has evolved considerably.

Dial back a few decades, for example, and on the top floor of the old Dayton's store in downtown Minneapolis, wildlife patrons, some in high heels, others in leather boots, celebrated with reverence this art form and its hotbed of Minnesota practitioners.

Then the Twin Cities grew bigger, rural life became less rural, and the continued draining of wetlands foretold a proportional decline of ducks and duck hunters.

"I also think a lot of people just ran out of room on their walls for wildlife paintings," Bob said.

Which is why winning the Federal Duck Stamp contest today isn't the million-dollar cash cow it once was, with originals fetching tens of thousands of dollars and prints ringing cash registers wherever waterfowl flew.

Still, the Hautman brothers' work is in demand. They each do a half-dozen or so commissions a year, some hanging over fireplaces in exquisite homes, others in clapboard hunting lodges where wet dogs snooze after long morning hunts. And the Hautmans' licensed artwork is ubiquitous, appearing on wallpaper, jigsaw puzzles, clocks, coasters and more.

"This year, Jim, Joe and I are flying to Connecticut to watch the judging in September," Bob said. "The same fellow bought all of our winning original stamp paintings, and they've since been donated to a museum where the judging will be held. So we'll get to see those, which will be nice.

"But to be honest, I liked the judging the way we experienced it in 2016.

"The three of us were hunting elk in Montana that year, and we didn't have a cell signal where we were camping to see who won. So we drove into a small town, got on the internet and found out we had placed first, second and third, with Joe winning it.

"That was nice. Then we drove back to our tent and had a beer."