ARTWORK DRAWS ON REAL LIFE; TAXIDERMIST SEES HIMSELF AS ARTIST

JACKSON -- Deer, birds and fish decorate the walls of Devin Amelunke's studio in Jackson. Amelunke's animals aren't painted on canvas; they're the mounted, tanned skins of wildlife that show off his skills as a taxidermist.

"Taxidermists like to call it artwork," he said, "because you are trying to create an emotion or a feeling about that animal. Artists do the same thing on canvas.

"I want them to look real," said Amelunke. "I don't want them to look stuffed. A stuffed animal is my little girl's Teddy bear."

In his small, wooden studio behind his home, the 24-year-old Amelunke spends countless hours on his craft. The front room of his studio is crammed full of deer heads in all shapes and sizes, fish, fowl, and even a snake.

Many of them seem almost alive. A wild turkey, poised as if in flight, hangs from the rafters; a raccoon mounted on a branch looks down from his lofty perch.

But the center of attention is an enormous, full-sized Alaskan brown bear mounted on an artificial, moss-covered rock.

"It's the biggest animal I have ever worked on," said Amelunke. The bear was mounted for a customer who shot the huge animal while on a hunting trip to Alaska. It's estimated the bear weighed about 1,000 pounds in the field.

"I started the day after Christmas on him and I finished him up about the third of January," said Amelunke. "I've mounted life-sized deer and they're nothing like this bear."

As owner and operator of Ozark Mountain Taxidermy. Amelunke mounts hundreds of animals. "I typically average about 100 deer heads per year. I do about 40 ducks a year and about 150 fish." He also mounts a number of other wildlife such as rattlesnakes and foxes. An alligator head ranks as the most unusual mounting that Amelunke has done.

"The only goal I have is to try to produce the animal as lifelike as I can," he explained. "It really is an art form in a way. Essentially you want to take a piece out of nature and put it indoors. Really, your own imagination is your only limitation."

Taxidermy, said Amelunke, literally means to move or to place skin. The process involves taking the skin off the animal and preserving the skin. Usually it is tanned; then the skin is mounted and glued over a polyurethane form. Amelunke ships the skins, or capes, as he calls them, off to a tannery to be cleaned, polished and preserved.

The entire process from cleaning to the mounting generally takes about three or four months, with much of that time involving the tanning of the skins. The actual mounting itself takes a relatively short amount of time. Amelunke said a bird takes about six to eight hours to mount; a deer's head about 12 hours.

"It's just a piece of leather with hair on it, that's all it is," he said. The real skill, said Amelunke, comes in the mounting of the skin.

"It's just a big plus for me to do something I like and get paid for it, too," said Amelunke, who first began mounting animals as a hobby while a high-school student in Fredericktown.

"I hunted and fished a lot," he recalled. While in high school, Amelunke took a taxidermy correspondence course, where he learned the basics.

"I started with pigeons," he said, remembering that he used to shoot pigeons that flocked around an old barn. His first attempts at taxidermy were not works of art. "I'd mount a pigeon and it would look terrible," he said.

After his graduation from high school in 1984, Amelunke attended college at the School of the Ozarks for two years. He then married and moved to Jackson, where some of his relatives live.

He started working as a taxidermist part time in 1986 and 1987 while attending Southeast Missouri State University. Amelunke was graduated in 1989 from Southeast with a bachelor's degree in wildlife biology, and he has been working full time as a taxidermist for just over a year now.

The biology background, he said, has helped him in the mounting of animals and the creation of realistic-like settings. "I study a lot of animals; I study a lot of reference materials," he explained.

Amelunke said he studies pictures of wild animals. It's not uncommon for him to photograph wild animals that are nursed back to health at the home of a Cape Girardeau man.

No two deer are exactly alike, he said. "Typically, you find differences in facial color. Deer are just like people: when I work on a deer's head, there is no doubt in my mind that that animal had a certain personality."

Amelunke said he tries to bring out those individual traits. "I saw this animal as a nervous kind of deer," he said, working on a young buck that had one ear pulled back as if startled by a sudden sound of danger.

Amelunke said taxidermy used to be a profession dominated by those in their mid-40s or older. But these days, he said, there are younger people getting into the business.

"It's very difficult to make a living at it. You have to be able to do good work quickly," he pointed out. "You have to be able to mount two or three animals a day."

A lot has changed in the taxidermy business over the years. Ten or 15 years ago, most mounted animals were viewed as hunting trophies; but more and more, they are being viewed as artistic works, said Amelunke.

A mallard, depicted in a pond-like setting, in his studio is the type of work that's right at home on a coffee table.

Amelunke said he derives satisfaction from turning "an old dead skin, that would decay and rot, into something that will look real and last a lifetime."