OUTDOORS COLUMN: Their works truly are forms of art

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts doesn't reopen until May of next year. The November First Fridays isn't for three weeks. What's an art lover to do?

Usually the answer to that question would not be, "Go to Orvis." But tomorrow it is, especially if you're into art with an outdoors theme.

The fly-fishing store in the Short Pump Mall wraps up its Fall Orvis Days tomorrow with seminars on everything from duck and goose calling to targeting game fish around the Outer Banks. But for my money, the real draw is the art.

Why? Two names: Guy Crittenden and Heck Rice.

Work by Crittenden, a painter and illustrator, has been chosen for two of the past three Virginia duck stamps. Rice, a waterfowl decoy maker, recently was named a master carver by the National Endowment for the Arts.

Of course, talking about art and artists is like describing a great meal and restaurant. You get the idea, but it's no substitute for seeing (or tasting) the real thing. You need to see these guys' work to really appreciate it. But since all we've got here are words, let me try to impress you on their behalf.

Take Crittenden. After winning two of the past three Virginia duck stamp competitions for depictions of wood ducks and Canada geese (hunters must buy state and federal stamps to hunt waterfowl in the commonwealth), the Richmond resident has his sights set on this year's Federal Duck Stamp competition. He finished the portrait in August, and the judging is today and tomorrow.

This is a national competition sponsored by the Department of the Interior, and any American artist can enter. Crittenden has never finished worse than 20th. His best result was fifth in 2003. The work is limited to a few specific waterfowl species, and then is judged on its fidelity to that species and the habitat in which it's pictured.

"You want it to be very simple," Crittenden said, "But also elegant and anatomically correct. They'll kick it out if it doesn't meet all the criteria."

Because we're talking about art in an area as small as a stamp, Crittenden (http://www.crittendenstudio.com) sometimes uses reading glasses to "get in there and do the detail. You can only put so much stuff in it."

Rice's challenge comes not so much from the size of his work as the medium he works on. Most decoy makers carve ducks from wood; Rice fashions his from wood (the head and keel), canvas and wire (the body), the way hunters without access to prime carving woods did during the heyday of waterfowling on the East Coast.

Often, canvas sails from storm-wrecked ships were stretched across wire and painted to look like mergansers, mallards and the like. That's the tradition Rice carries on today.

"I don't carve duck decoys, I engineer them," he told Virginia Sportsman magazine in a recent interview.

Nevertheless, Rice, who's been making decoys for more than a quarter century, has won numerous awards from the International Wildlife Carvers Association. The Ward Museum of Waterfowl Art honored his wood duck and cormorant decoys with best-in-show awards not long ago.

Rice will give a talk on the art of making wire and canvas decoys at 10 a.m. tomorrow. Crittenden will be at Orvis from noon to 4 p.m. with some original wildlife paintings as well as reproductions of his winning duck stamp entries.

In other words, if waterfowl and wildlife art is your thing, tomorrow Orvis has the best show in town.

Contact Andy Thompson at