Kelly Mulford Signed 1987 Color Scrimshaw Hooded Merganser Fossil Walrus Ivory

David Kelly Mulford (American, 1949-2011). "Female Hooded Merganser" scrimshaw on fossilized walrus ivory on a Goncalo Alves wood base, 1987. Signed and dated at lower right. A polychrome scrimshaw by David Kelly Mulford (American, 1949-2011), titled "Female Hooded Merganser" and engraved on a polished section of fossilized walrus ivory. The hen floats in profile on rippled water. Her cinnamon crest is fanned out like a punk's mohawk, and the fine stippling and hair-line engraving pick out every barred feather, the slate-blue tertials, and the white wing patch. A hazy sky with two pale orbs fills the background. The scene sits inside a double-ruled cartouche with canted corners, and the ivory beyond it is left creamy and smooth. The rough, mineral-stained ends of the tusk are left unworked, so the raw material frames the finished picture. The piece is signed and dated "Kelly Mulford 1987" at lower right and rests on a custom Gonçalo Alves wood stand. Scrimshaw began as the shipboard pastime of nineteenth-century whalers, who incised sperm whale teeth and baleen with needles and knives and rubbed lampblack into the lines. In the later twentieth century a generation of studio scrimshanders turned the craft into a fine-art practice. They used jeweler's tools, magnification, and colored inks to build up tone and color one tiny dot or hairline at a time, so that each cut holds pigment like a miniature intaglio plate. Fossilized walrus ivory, recovered from ancient deposits in the permafrost and beaches of Alaska, became a favored ground for this work. Centuries of burial give the tusk its warm tones and the mottled, crystalline core visible at the ends of this piece, and the dense outer dentine takes a high polish and a very fine line. The hooded merganser (Lophodytes cucullatus) is a small diving duck of North American wooded ponds and rivers. The drake has a dramatic black and white fan, but the hen is subtler and arguably more charming, with a shaggy rufous crest she can raise or flatten at will. Mulford's choice of the female, rendered with the precision of a field-guide plate, places the work within the American tradition of waterfowl art that runs from decoy carving to the Federal Duck Stamp. A Certificate of Authenticity will accompany all winning bids. Item # 206288

Estimation:€470.82

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