How does one become a painter of buffalo hides, a scrimshander of mammoth bones?
”It`s certainly not something you can go to college to get a degree in,” admits craftsman Alan Jiranek as he sits in his second-floor studio in his circa 1915 log house on the Fox River in Yorkville.
”No one would go to school and say, `Okay, I`m going to paint buffalo hides and do scrimshaw for a living.` It would be just too crazy. For me, it was a hobby that just took over. Maybe sometimes you are just meant to do things.”
It is obvious that no matter what he studied in college, the 43-year-old Jiranek has found his niche. His studio is a testament to that.
On the walls are large buffalo-hide hangings covered with delicately painted scenes depicting American Indian life and legends. A desk is covered with examples of his scrimshaw skill, engravings on knife handles, jars and jewelry made out of bone. On a table near a window, where he has a full view of the river, are drawings for another wall hanging yet to be created.
He explains that it was a serious illness in his family that brought about his career shift. It happened after he had graduated from Northern Illinois University with a bachelor of arts degree in advertising and marketing and had gone to work as an art director for a large Chicago advertising agency.
”I started doing freelance advertising work from home,” Jiranek says.
”When Mom passed away, I decided I didn`t want to go back to that commute to downtown Chicago, so I continued working from home. I got to where I was always watching commercials. Other people would get up and leave when the commercials came on, but I liked them better than the programs. `This is crazy,` I told myself, and put the TV in the closet.”
That was the end of his advertising career and his obsession with commercials, but Jiranek was faced with another problem: He didn`t know what to do with himself.
Powder horn research
”I always liked art and I was always interested in Indians,” Jiranek says. ”I studied the powder horns from the French and Indian War. It`s amazing how many obscure books there are on the subject. The scrimshaw? I always thought it was neat.”
So he got some steer horn (”As long as McDonald`s stays in business, I`ll have steer horn”) and tried his hand at engraving a pheasant and a duck, using his pocket knife. He wanted to do it the way the Indians had done it before the French and Indian War.
”I wasn`t smart enough to know that I should wrap some leather around the blade so I wouldn`t cut my fingers,” he says, laughing. ”After a short time I realized this couldn`t be right. They wouldn`t have had a trigger finger left to do any shooting with. Then it dawned on me. I could use a sharpened needle (instead of a knife).”
His second engraving was of a deer, meticulously drawn in needle points on a polished steer horn. Rubbed with ink to darken the engraving, the horn was then polished to a soft sheen with fine steel wool, then with the cheapest paper Jiranek could find, crumpled up into a ball.
”Polishing the horn is one of two good uses for junk mail,” Jiranek says. ”The other is for my wood stove. I`m one of the few people who look forward to junk mail.”
He says the bad thing about scrimshaw is there can be no mistakes, because there is no way to undo a mistake.
”I do white on white over a pencil drawing and I don`t see what I have until it`s inked.”
Living on letter openers
Jiranek has been doing the scrimshaw for about eight years. The first year he started doing handles for letter openers and got so many orders that he realized he could do this for a living. In fact, he says he got so many orders from companies wanting to give presents at Christmas time that his hand was cramped in a claw for a month after Christmas. He has stopped taking mass orders.
”I always looked at people in the arts and thought you have to be crazy to do something like that,” he says. ”I thought they were all living in a garret, starving, but you can make a good living at it.”
Jiranek now does his scrimshaw on shed moose and elk antlers, steer and buffalo bones and ivory from mammoths that washes out of Alaskan glaciers during spring thaws. The steer bones come from Texas and Mexican slaughter houses, the buffalo bones from a Kansas slaughter house, the elk antlers from horn hunters who in the spring search the mountains in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming for shed antlers.
Asked how he decides what to engrave on a piece, he says that sometimes the horn decides that for him: ”I kind of let the horn tell me. Some look like clouds or birds or underwater. I don`t do nautical scenes because I felt if you had whale teeth, you would put nautical scenes on them.
”The horn color goes from amber to a reddish brown. Horn has a very odd property. If you soak it in water for a few days and boil it you can mold it. You can open it up and it retains the shape you left it in. In the past, we used it for book coverings. It was the colonial American`s plastic. It`s very durable, waterproof, insectproof, rodentproof.
”There used to be a whole class of artisans called horn smiths. I`m trying to keep that alive, to stay away from touristy pieces and create decorative pieces, works of art.”
It was his search for new sources of horn that got Jiranek into painting buffalo hides six years ago.
A Wichita, Kan., slaughtering company, Buffalo Legends, learned about Jiranek`s craft and offered to provide buffalo bones but also was interested in what Jiranek could do with the other products left when buffalo were slaughtered for meat.
Uses for buffalo leftovers
”He did some sample paintings of buffalo robes with hair on them, to determine what kind of paints he should use and the drying times,” recalled Pam Morris, who with her partner, John Reed, owns Buffalo Legends. ”He scrimshawed some buffalo jawbones, or mandibles, in a scene called `Prairie Confrontation,` Indians stalking buffalo on a hunt. He did others in prayer sticks with religious overtones.
”I was thoroughly impressed. When I first heard about him, I thought, this is crazy, but it might be fun to see what he can come up with. I was delighted. Later, when I would get a box from him, it was like getting something from Santa.”
Jiranek says that when he gets a robe from Morris it takes him a week to 10 days to develop a scene and paint it. He uses acrylic paints watered down so they will look like watercolors when they dry on the leather.
”The Indians used mineral pigments,” he says. ”I could use them, but they aren`t as durable. Indians didn`t use water with their paints; they used a very fine glue. I need something durable, because I don`t know what people are going to do with my robes. Some even wear them.”
He says he gets his inspiration for his scenes by doing research into Indian legends and looking at Indian robes in museums. He read the ledgers that Lewis and Clark left from their expeditions. He found the technical information fascinationg. He says that Chicago`s Newberry Library and the Field Museum have been especially helpful.
”You look at these things and you wonder how in the world the Indians did this, and then you start to study the old technologies. I use materials the Indians would have been familiar with,” Jiranek says. ”He would understand what a lot of the symbols I use mean. I am not reproducing Indian artwork, but I use their symbols. There is a big chunk of realism in my work that the Indian didn`t use. What I`ve done is taken a person and told his story, something that I`ve made up.”
Jiranek`s robes and scrimshaw on buffalo bones are sold by Morris at a small store she opened two years ago near the Denver airport. In her store, she also sells buffalo meat and buffalo craft items, such as moccasins, lampshades, garments and jewelry.
Life on leather
”Alan`s stuff is on the higher end as far as cost,” Morris said. ”A lot of people admire it. His things are appreciated for their artistic merit, not just for their uniqueness. It isn`t special just because he put it on a buffalo hide but because it is a work in itself. He brings his characters to life on leather. My favorite thing he has done is of a buffalo dance. I took it to Bloomingdale`s in New York and they loved it. It later sold in Colorado for $3,500.”
She said she can`t afford one of Jiranek`s buffalo robes yet, but she has held on to some of the early things he sent her, and her partner owns a letter opener with a handle scrimshawed by Jiranek.
”Alan`s been one of my favorite people to work with,” Morris added. ”I think he`s terrific. I went up once and met him on a trip with my family. He`s such a unique person. I`d love to have him for a neighbor.”
In addition to Morris` Denver store, Jiranek has had his scrimshaw and buffalo robes sold by art galleries as far away as Tokyo; Zurich; Vail, Colo.; Beverly Hills and Carmel, Calif.; New York; and Stillwater, Minn. A Chicago store, Design West at 415 N. La Salle St., began this year to carry his work. Five years ago, Jiranek went into partnership with an internationally known reconstructionist archeologist, Errett Callahan of Lynchburg, Va. Jiranek had seen an article on Callahan, describing his work as a flint knapper, a person who fashions knives out of stone by chipping away at the stone. Jiranek wrote Callahan, and the two now collaborate on a series of prehistoric-type knives with Callahan`s blade and Jiranek`s scrimshawed antler handle. The collectors knives cost from $430 to $2,000. They do six of one knife style per year.
Callahan, who holds a master`s degree in fine art from Virginia Commonwealth University and master`s and doctorate degrees from Catholic University in Washington, does freelance consultation, interpreting archeological finds to explain how tools and other items were used by prehistoric man. He has spent the last two summers in Sweden studying Neolithic tools there. He also devotes much of his time to teaching students his skills in workshops run at his Virginia home.
Partners who haven`t met
Callahan, who said he and Jiranek have never met, decided to go into the partnership after seeing examples of Jiranek`s work.
”I liked the quality of his line. His work sort of made reference to the cave art,” Callahan said. ”It has a bit of a cartoon effect, too. His stippling, made by points, holds up under a microscope. I think it`s appropriate for stone knives. When he has sent me his designs, so far, I have immediately liked what he has come up with.”
Jiranek`s first design was of a sabertooth tiger for a knife whose blade was made of obsidian, a hard, dark-colored volcanic glass. Another knife series features Indian scenes. A third, fashioned after an Aztec sacrificial knife, has a cameo in ivory enscribed with a jaguar inset into the handle of purpleheart, a tropical hardwood from Africa.
”We split the time and the cost,” said Callahan. ”I wait until I get the scrimshawed handle before making the knife. The knife has to be fitted to the handle. I`m trying to take the blades farther than they went in the past. I`m doing things with the design, the edge, the quality, the precision, the shape. We`re back ordered on our knives about two years. They`re getting in some of the art galleries.
Jiranek doesn`t appear to be considering giving up his solitary work for the commute back into the city.
”You get so wrapped up in this, it`s like, `Oh my God, it`s dark out!`
” Jiranek says. ”I`d never say I get lonesome. My cat, Cicero, is a big help. I like to talk to people, but I had to make my hours only by appointment because I had so many people trooping through, I couldn`t get anything done. I have lots of friends. I have clients who fly in to see me; so I never really have the time to be lonesome. Then, when you`re in business for yourself, you always have the bookkeeping to keep you busy.”
