Immigrant Son - S. A. Walton Original Acrylic Wildlife Paintings

The female wood duck is one of the most beautifully endowed hens in North America, but she is often upstaged in art by the flashier male. I thought that situation needed to be rectified, and used an experience from my childhood on our Ozark farm as inspiration. The rocky Ozarks of Missouri with its whitewater streams are hardly the kind of place where ducks are expected to be sighted, so as a kid I was intrigued when I heard a curious piping sound from the cattails and willows across the pond where the springfed creek spills its cool waters into my personal fishing hole. The water wasn't deep on that side of the pond, so my curiousity led me to carefully wade over and investigate this previously unknown noise. No luck. The darn things quit piping on my approach. I circled around, and peered intently into the cattails again. At some point I must have made the hen nervous so she burst out of cover to draw me away from her new flotilla of fuzzy ducklings. Now that was a shocker- a duck, on OUR pond? It hardly seemed big enough to raise duckings on. But the setting was truly a wood duck's kind of place, as our pond was nestled right up against the woods and was slowly being circled by trees. Later I would get to see the flashy male who was partly responsible for the presence of the noisy little ducklings, but my first experience with a wood duck was with the female. She was a good parent, and didn't abandon her little ones because of my clumsy disruption of her day, for which I was gratified.

When I finally got around to painting a wood duck hen, she of course came to mind, a message from many years ago to inspire me. In that first wood duck mother's memory, it seemed appropriate to paint her in that familiar environment, and so I chose musclewood, brown-eyed susans, and the common waterside jewelweed, all beside the nearby and very inviting Cedar Creek.

The wood duck was a symbol of peace to the southeastern Indians of the United States. They used wood duck feathers to decorate their pipestems, and they depicted the wood duck frequently in their clay pottery, pottery which was tempered with heated and ground mussel shell like the mussels that can be easily found in Cedar Creek to this day. Some of the vessels the Mississippian peoples made featured renderings of a wood duck's tail, and a wood duck's head, the latter often with a rattle inside. I don't know how these vessels were used. It may have been ceremonial, since rattles seem unneccessary for utilitarian ware. It may be that they were made for children, to give them peace with the rattle sound. It may be that they were utilitarian, and the potters were simply endowing their works with as much beauty as they could purely for aesthetic reasons. No matter the purpose, the bowls are as much a curiousity as the secretive woodland species they depict.