THE CHESAPEAKE BAY GLITTERS AT THE BASE OF the hill behind Mark McNair as he swings a small hatchet into a block of white cedar, which with each effortless strike looks more and more like a duck.
“I make this look easy because I’ve been doing it a long time,” he says, casually spraying up wood chips like confetti into the sunlight.
It’s a scene seemingly from another time. Dressed in a worn oxford shirt and a frayed straw hat, McNair is at work beneath a craggy juniper tree about a hundred feet from the 205-year-old clapboard house where he lives with his wife, Martha, in remote Craddockville, Virginia, overlooking a body of water that, for centuries, has inspired so many of the nation’s finest carvers of duck decoys. Of that lineage, McNair is perhaps the most celebrated living practitioner.
“He is the dean of contemporary decoy carvers,” says Kory Rogers, the Francie and John Downing Senior Curator of American Art at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, home to what many consider the nation’s premier public decoy collection. “Albert Davids Laing, Elmer Crowell, Charles ‘Shang’ Wheeler…,” he says, rattling off the names of the legends. “We have all the great masters here, and it really speaks to Mark’s place within this field that he is the only living artist we have in the collection.”
McNair doesn’t seem to know he’s a living legend. He doesn’t even look like he knows he’s at work. He’s just chopping away in his
