EAST GRAND FORKS – “Making sawdust” has been a passion for John “Jack” Donelan for more than half of his 87 years.
It all started back in the ’60s, when Donelan began carving “working birds” – wooden decoys – for hunting waterfowl along the Platte River in Nebraska with his dad, James “Doc” Donelan, and brothers, Mike and Jim, all three of whom are no longer living.
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“I spent time hunting like a maniac,” Donelan said. “I’ve never seen so many ducks, as back in those days. You could be in the blind in the morning, about the time they were moving around heavy-duty like, and there were so many birds in the air, it was like a cloud.
“The limit was two birds, and you’d go out there and get your two birds by 7 o’clock in the morning.”
There have been thousands of carvings since then, says Donelan, who moved to East Grand Forks from Fergus Falls, Minnesota, with his wife, Susan, in May 2024.
“Decoy carving kind of hit me like a disease,” he said. “I hate to say it, but once you start carving, you can’t stop.”
Donelan’s road from Nebraska to Otter Tail County dates back to the mid-1940s, when the family began making summer trips to a cabin on West Battle Lake. He moved to western Minnesota for good after graduating from college, working a variety of jobs and supplementing his income with proceeds from the sale of his carvings.
“Most of them went to family and people who were willing to spend so (dang) much money, I couldn’t keep them on the shelf,” Donelan said. “It’s one of those things … I never charged a lot.”
Generally, Donelan says, he could complete two miniature carvings in a day or one full-size carving “as long as they’re not wood ducks,” which require meticulous painting.
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“If you’re painting a wood duck, you might as well figure on at least three or four hours because they have every color on them that you see every day,” he said.
While Donelan has sold most of his carvings, the couple’s East Grand Forks apartment is a showcase for several pieces of his work. Not only working decoys such as the scaup, or “bluebill,” which is among his first carvings, but ornamental creations that include a puffin, a loon, a ruddy turnstone (a type of shorebird), a swan, a (ticked) off Canada goose and a blue-winged teal.
“The ones I kept, I liked them so much I didn’t want to let them go,” he said.
Donelan inscribes the date on the base of each of his creations, along with an icon to indicate what the weather was like on that particular day – sun for a clear day, as an example, a raindrop for a rainy day or a snowflake for a snowy day.
He’s exhibited and sold his carvings at wildlife art shows “all over the place,” including Minnesota, North Dakota and Nebraska.
“I’ve been lucky enough that I have never had to jury for anything because they said, ‘Send pictures and we’ll let you know if we’ve got room for you,’ ” Donelan said. “So, I send the pictures, and they say ‘pack your bags’ – it’s been kind of fun.”
Wanted: Shop space
There hasn’t been much chance for Donelan to remedy his carving “disease” since moving to East Grand Forks because he doesn’t have a shop where he can carve.
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Donelan says he’d like to find another “Gomer” who enjoys carving and would be willing to share some shop time.
“I’m kind of strapped into an apartment where there is no possible way I can make sawdust, so my decoy carving has gone on the shelf for a while until I find someone who enjoys it like I do and is willing to share a little shop time with me,” he said.
Instead of making sawdust, Donelan says, he’s been drawing patterns for wooden cars, which he also enjoys carving. His wife figures he’s drawn “in the neighborhood of 5,000” wooden car patterns in the past several months, Donelan says.
“Of course, there’s no place to build those, either,” he said. “So, basically all I do is draw the patterns.”
That’s yet another “Gomer issue,” Donelan says with a laugh. He taught carving classes through community education programs in Fergus Falls and says he’d like to line up similar opportunities in East Grand Forks.
“I will teach anything about woodworking that people want to learn,” Donelan said. “I will teach decoy carving or toy car making, and the decoy carving can be either working birds or decorative birds.”
Watching the wood
Donelan uses a rotary die grinder, as opposed to a knife, for his carvings and mostly uses soft wood. Blue spruce, white pine, Norway pine and various cedar species are among his favorites, he says.
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“I use any number of woods, based on what I want the wood to say,” Donelan said. “All my patterns basically are photographs enlarged to the size of the piece of wood I have. It could be anything from miniature to full size, depending upon how the grain ran and how big the tree was.”
Very little goes to waste.
“If I see a scrap and it’s pretty good size, I see a bird at the same time,” he said.
In addition to its carving qualities, soft wood has a raised grain that Donelan accentuates upon finishing a carving. To do that, he lightly burns the wood with a propane torch, using a flap sander to carefully remove the ashes.
“It gives you the absolute, most beautiful brown you could get, and it also raises the grain, because the pulp area of the wood burns faster than the grain area,” Donelan said. “You can feel the grain through almost every bird I’ve ever made. And that’s basically one of the reasons why I’ve kept some of them because I really liked the way the grain associated with the shape of the bird (resembled) feathers because the grain flowed in the direction the feathers would.”
When his carving venture was at its peak, Donelan says he’d give buyers their choice on whether they wanted the carvings painted or abstract.
“I would carve them to shape and then burn them and clean them and take a picture of them and send them to the people,” he said. “I’d tell them I would continue to put the lifestyle painting on them if that’s what they wished – or I will sand it until I get close to the natural color of the wood and then wax it and polish it, and they can have it as an abstract piece.”
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Give him a choice, and Donelan says he prefers the more abstract look, rather than painting his carvings.
“Basically, if I were to carve today, every one of them would be abstract as (heck),” Donelan said. “Trying to copy what Mother Nature does is an insult to her. Do with a piece of wood what the tree would like you to do with it.
“That has gotten to be my rule,” he added. “It’s just one of those ‘heart’ things.”
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