State-Journal.com - Taxidermist says his projects are mounting

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Photo By Kelly MackeyTaxidermist Jim Barnes airbrushes a deer mount in his shop. Jim first tried his hand at taxidermy with a home kit. Over the years, he has improved his skills and turned his hobby into a business.

For some, taxidermy evokes a vision of blood and guts.

But for Jim Barnes, owner of Broken Arrow Taxidermy, it’s something different.

“It really, truly is an art form,” he said one rainy morning at his shop in rural Franklin County.

And after watching Jim at work, you tend to believe him.

Yes, there are bloodstains on the cement floor and deep freezers filled to the brim with animal skins. There are scalpels and superglue, an upholstery stretcher and a drawer full of glass eyes.

But there are also dozens of bottles of paint, and choosing the right shade can revive a colorless, dead fish, or restore the shiny black dots that speckle a deer’s nose.

Animals are mounted with the elements of balance and composition in mind.

Jim and his family even raised deer – bottle fed since birth by his daughters – so he could study their movement and expressions.

“If I asked you to paint a sunflower, and you did it off memory, you wouldn’t do as good as if you had it right in front of you,” he says as he airbrushes white paint around the eyes of a buck.

“The whole idea is, when someone takes the deer home, you want it to be as close to Mother Nature as possible.”

Then he pauses to blend his work with a paintbrush.

“You don’t want it to look like Tammy Faye Baker.”

Jim frequently mounts deer, turkey and bass in addition to ducks, bears, bobcats, squirrels, raccoons and dogs.

The biggest animal he ever mounted was an 8-foot grizzly bear bagged in Alaska. The smallest: a cockatiel.

Jim completes between 100 and 250 projects a year. The number depends on the animals his customers bring in – deer take eight to 10 hours each, while fish take five.

He also restores mounts that have languished in basements, or faded after years in the sun. He’s had customers bring in a truckload after their homes caught fire.

“I like working with my hands, and I like doing something that other people appreciate,” he said.

“You’ve got to have the ability to see things, and transfer what you see to what your hands do.”

The wait time at Jim’s shop is more than a year. He knows some customers would rather go to a shop with a faster turnaround, but he says his quality work is worth the wait.

“I’m here working every day. Just be patient.”

Taxidermists walk different paths when learning their craft.

“You’ve got the little redneck guy in his garage, you’ve got guys who do taxidermy for bigger markets like Lexington and Louisville, and then you’ve got guys who work for the Smithsonian and on movie sets,” he said.

Some start with kits ordered through the mail. Others pay for lessons or attend a three- to six-month program at a taxidermy school. Then there’s “trial by fire.”

That’s the one Jim picked. He did his first taxidermy project in the early 1990s. He ordered “one of those at-home, do-it-yourself, order-by-mail kits” for a deer he’d killed while hunting.

At the same time, a Lawrenceburg taxidermist was working on another deer for him.

“When I got the deer back from the taxidermist, the one I had worked on was kind of better than that one,” he said. “So I thought, ‘Heck, this is a great way to make some extra money.’”

He eventually quit his job with state government to start a carpet-cleaning business and do taxidermy full time. He opened a store in Frankfort, across the street from a beauty shop, and stayed there for a decade.

His 10-year-old daughter, Sarah, remembers when she and her sister stuck their hands in the wet cement sidewalk out front. The prints are still there, she said.

Jim joined the Kentucky Taxidermy Association, became vice president and later president.

A year and a half ago he built a studio adjacent to the Peaks Mill home he shares with his three kids, Cole, 16, Ashley, 14, and Sarah. He’s divorced now, and he must balance his paperwork and inventory with his girls’ cheerleading and soccer practice.

“It is a business too,” he said. “You have to split your time, you have to take time away from your family.”

Sarah joins him in the shop to help. She cleans worktables and sweeps the floor, but she’s also skinned a few animals.

“She likes playing with scalpels,” he said. “They (the kids) will grab a piece of the hide and start cutting the meat off of it, just for play.”

There are pictures of Sara as a child, wearing latex gloves so big that they hang off her tiny, 4-year-old fingers.

She says her friends are squeamish about her hobby. Her dad has carted clean skulls, mannequins, forms and brushes to her school for career day.

“They’re like, ‘Ew, how could you be touching that?’” she said.

But she proudly pulls a duck out of a closet. Once a prizewinner for her dad, the duck now has sparkly gold feet. She’s been painting it for years, Jim says.

“She’s a little tree hugger born too late,” he says, leaning over toward his daughter. “But she does like the taxidermy stuff. I don’t know if she’d ever kill anything.”

She shakes her head no.

When a hunter brings an animal to Jim’s shop, the first thing he does is take measurements. He skins the animal, except the head, and stores it in a deep freezer.

When he had his shop in town, a customer brought in a 6-foot bear he hunted in Pennsylvania. It was too big to get inside in one piece.

So they skinned it in the parking lot – across from the beauty shop.

That’s probably the grossest part of taxidermy, he said, and the toughest.

“But when I finally get to set the ears, put the attitude and expression in the eyes and airbrush, that’s the fun part,” he said.

When he’s ready to work on the animal, he orders a foam form that will fit. There are different forms for each pose – deer turned to the right or left, head up or down, ears back or forward.

“It’s just like a JC Penny’s catalog,” he said. “There are all different sizes.”

Jim tans the hide, preserving it as leather. The form goes onto a mounting stand, and the hide is slipped on “like a sock.” He washes the deer hides in Tide.

Once a hide is mounted, it takes 10 days to two weeks to dry. Then Jim checks the animal for shrinkage, fixing gaps that have developed between the skin and the eye and filling cracks with sculpting epoxy.

“Everything in nature is soft, even if you go look at yourself in the mirror,” he said. “Every curve, everything on your face is just smooth.”

Then it’s time for the finishing touches.

That morning in September, Jim donned a denim apron and latex gloves before nonchalantly plucking a goose, wrapped in a bath towel, from the icebox. It hadn’t completely thawed, so he turned instead to a deer restoration project.

He smoothes the hides with a hairbrush, and then uses a 15-year-old toothbrush to remove the extra paint from inside its ears. The paint is supposed to stick to the skin, not the fur.

A mistake some taxidermists make is to brush the hair straight back on a deer, but animals have hair patterns just like people.

“It looks like the deer stuck his head out of the car on the ride home,” he said.

“When you put the hide back on a deer, or line the scales up on a fish, or put a duck back together, you have to make sure you put everything back where it’s supposed to go.”

He airbrushes pink inside the nose, white inside the ears and around the eyes. He blends the colors to look natural.

Jim even mounts pets. He’s answered phone calls from tough truck drivers, reduced to tears when their dogs die.

A dog owner himself, Jim understands. He says he’ll be a wreck when his German shepherd Blitz passes away.

But as a businessman, he requires full payment up front for pets.

“You’re going to be torn up – you lost a member of your family,” he said.

“But if you only pay a deposit, six or eight months later when you get your dog back, you’ve already got a new puppy.”

There’s another challenge when working with cats and dogs: Their owners know every facial expression they make.

“If you don’t get it just right, the people are going to think it looks like a little stuffed dog instead of their dog,” he said.

So sleeping poses – curled up with eyes closed – are most common. It’s more comforting anyway, he says. People like to leave them resting in the corner of their living rooms.

“I’d take my cat and put her on my bed,” Sarah says.

Jim used to participate in competitions – he once earned second-place worldwide for a deer mount.

But he doesn’t have much time for that anymore. Competition mounts are labor intensive, and the details are minute.

“They split hairs – literally,” he said.

He has a year’s worth of work in the freezer anyway, and with his shop next door to his house, he can head there any time.

“It’s always in the back of your mind,” he said.

“Should I sit here and play games with my son? Should I take extra time to cook a big meal tonight? Or should I open a can of Beanie Weanies and go work for an extra three hours?”

Still, he’s his own boss, in control of his future. And it’s better than pushing paper in an office building.

“The positive is, that it really allows you to do something that not many people know how to do.”

“Frankfort Faces” is a series that highlights people from within the Frankfort and Franklin County community. Each feature follows one of the city’s most unique personalities and includes a story, photos and video, which can be found by clicking the TV icon attached to the story online at state-journal.com.