Decoys - Collectibles
Great condition. Hand carved by the well-known decoy artist, Ed Snyder.
RIO VISTA -- Ed Snyder is an unpretentious, home-spun character who readily laughs, tells tales that extend back to the market hunters of the 1930s and shares his artistic secrets that enabled him to become California’s foremost decoy carver.
Outside a cluttered workshop, set next to a backyard strewn with decoys, wood shavings, weathered tables and old duck hunting equipment, Snyder, 72, carves his magic. He quickly turns a block of bass wood imported from the Mississippi Valley into the shape of a duck.
With the use of a simple Warren knife, file and sandpaper, the body of a decoy suddenly emerges while he laughs, tells stories and shapes the wood with amazing ease.
″At one point, I did more than 5,000 working decoys in a five-year period in the late 1940s,″ Snyder said. ″I learned it from a carver named ‘Fresh Air’ Dick Janson, who made decoys with an ax and painted the feathers with a cutoff tule.″
As a youngster, Snyder was raised in nearby Bird’s Landing and tutored by his grandfather, one of the most proficient market hunters of the time. He did nothing but hunt and carve decoys, and he still bears a scar from an early slip of the knife.