Rick Pass (Astoria, OR) is a duck decoy carver whose work draws on his local roots. He grew up hunting with decoys on the Columbia River and seeing Charles Bergman’s masterful decoys displayed in homes around town. Pass’s decoys include “contemporary antiques,” birds that emulate works by Bergman and other regional decoy carvers.
Bio
Rick Pass carves wooden duck decoys at his home workshop, just steps away from the Columbia River. For a typical decorative decoy, Rick studies taxidermied birds as well as biological drawings; he uses electric carving tools to shape a realistic, even illusionistic bird. For competitive carvers like Pass, this traditional art form is no longer about attracting live ducks. Instead, it’s about appealing to the trained human eye, and earning good marks from judges. If the decoys manage to fool someone in the process, that’s an indicator of success. “I just can’t believe that you would kill these beautiful birds!” Pass recalls someone saying to a master carver. Even though Pass’s birds are mainly for display, he draws on a deep well of tradition associated with wooden decoy hunting on the Columbia. Just outside his door, there’s hallowed ground for the most sought-after species: the green-head mallard, pintails (aka “white-neckers”), and green-wing teal. Rick Pass grew up hunting these birds over plastic, mass-produced decoys. At the same time, the homemade wooden decoys were never far from view. “If you were to go into homes in this area, the people who have been here, probably almost all of them have at least one,” Pass explains. “They’ve kept it. It’s up on the mantle, and there’s something kind of special about a wood decoy that’s been out hunting… it’s the story of it. All the things that that decoy had to go through to get up on that mantle.” Over the years, Pass has shifted his attention from emulating live ducks to emulating those prized historic decoys. In the competitive carving world, there’s a name for this type of work: contemporary antiques. Pass helps organize competitions in Oregon and Washington, and he’s worked to build interest in the practice of copying local historic carvers. Some of his own contemporary antiques include decoys that precisely recreate carvings such as those that the legendary Astoria master artist Charles Bergman carved. Rick prides himself of the accuracy of this work, noting that a member of the Bergman family once mistook his decoy for a Bergman original.
