Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 21, 1995 TAG: 9511210055
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: KERRS CREEK LENGTH: Long
Carolyn G. Hall spends her winter mornings doing chores and waiting for the phone to ring.
If she's very lucky, the caller won't be just any friend or relative. It will be her neighbor, Anna Lee Gadd, a retired school teacher and veteran hunter.
Gadd does not say hello to Hall when she calls. She does not engage in small-talk, nor does she inquire as to the status of Hall's day.
She simply tells the Rockbridge County wildlife artist - quickly and definitively - that company's been spotted in the immediate vicinity.
``She'll say, `There are 16 hens heading in your direction.' And then she hangs up,'' explains Hall, 52.
That's Hall's cue to get to work.
She turns off the washing machine and takes the phone off the hook - to eliminate any noise. She rushes to the tripod in front of her living-room window and takes up her arms.
And then, in a flutter, she waits.
Carolyn G. Hall loves to shoot turkeys. She loves to bait them - with the 40-pound bags of cracked corn her husband hauls home from the feed store. She loves to crouch down quietly behind the glass of her picture window with her telephoto lens, like a hunter on the prowl.
She does not kill turkeys, she emphasizes. She shoots them with her camera. Then she uses the photographs to re-create the creatures with her chalk pastels.
``When the gobblers come in and they're getting ready to strut, it's like a ceremony,'' she enthuses. ``I can almost hear music in the background.''
She points to a photograph of three fanned-out gobblers - all in a line, preparing for their synchronized strut. She used this picture as the model for her National Wild Turkey Federation art entry this year.
``It's like a dance, the way they move together,'' she says. ``I think the wild turkey is absolutely beautiful.''
Hall and her turkeys have a good thing going: She plumps them up with her cracked corn and protects them by posting ``NO HUNTING'' signs across her land. And they feed her reputation as a burgeoning turkey portraitist.
With a full load of commissions on her palette (at prices ranging from $800 to $1,200 each), the self-taught artist has become one of the region's best-known wildlife painters.
It wasn't always that way. Before she and her husband moved into these House Mountain foothills last year, Hall had a hard time capturing the precious poultry on film.
She resorted, once, to photographing a recuperating turkey at the Waynesboro Wildlife Center - in a cage. She hounded turkey hunters to let her tag along on their quests.
``I needed to see them in their natural habitat, so I begged every turkey hunter in Rockbridge County,'' she recalls. ``I said, `Please, I'll get up early, I'll wear the cammouflage.' '' But the hunters never took the bait.
``I think they thought I'd get so excited that I'd chase the turkeys off. They were thinking, `That crazy woman, she doesn't know a hen from a gobbler.`''
And now, who needs them?
``I like to, in a subtle way, poke fun at the hunters.'' One of her earlier paintings featured a crouching hunter, eyes focused and gun clutched ... with a big buck sauntering casually behind him.
``I think turkeys are wonderfully brilliant animals,'' she says. ``Every once in a while, they meet up with a bad streak of luck and get killed. But when you see how many of them are still around, you know they're not that dumb.''
In fact, the gobblers bear an uncanny resemblance to the male gender of the human species. ``The gobblers fan and strut to show off for the hens,'' she says, pointing to a picture. ``Here they were, all fanned out like the Thanksgiving Day turkey, and they were having guy talk, saying, `Look at all these women!'
``They were so regal. And yet here are the hens - hardly even noticing them. The hens just kept on eating like they weren't even there.''
Hall looks after her turkeys like a hen protecting her flock. She's developed an attachment to one of the split-tail gobblers with a missing feather. She adores the beauty of her favorite hen, who likes to fly into a nearby pine tree: ``Like a sentry, she sits up there with her little ones feeding below.''
Last August, when a hen suddenly paraded through the yard with her poults, Hall said to her husband, ``Look, they're coming back to thank me for feeding them and to show me their babies.''
And don't even think about mentioning the perennial turkey put-down around Hall - the one about turkeys being so dumb that they drown themselves ... by looking up at the rain.
``No way,'' she says. ``I don't believe it.''
And now, time for the Big Question:
When Hall sits down Thursday for Thanksgiving dinner, what will she eat?
``A store-bought turkey,'' she concedes. ``That is the truth.''
Like many non-hunting nonvegetarians, she's developed her own rationalizations for meat-eating. ``There are turkeys raised for eating. And there are wild turkeys raised to enjoy in the woods, and I don't even associate the two,'' she says.
``The wild turkey has so much poise and elegance. They have learned to survive in the woods, to cope with new circumstances - like people building houses where they're used to eating.''
And then snapping pictures of the birds.
Sometimes on those dreary winter mornings, Hall's imagination is stirred by a hen scratching in her yard. Sometimes a gobbler struts by with the grace of a cover girl on the runway - just for Hall.
Or so she likes to imagine. With more commissions than she can keep up with, Carolyn Hall is just grateful for the show.
by CNB