By Todd C. Elliott
Lake Charles native Mark Fontenot has taken what he calls “a passion and a labor of love” and represented the Lake Area as a world champion in 2025. For 35 years, Fontenot has been carving out wooden duck decoys that have now been recognized as truly some of the best in the world.
There is a Zen meditation regarding the uncarved block of wood as a symbol of the natural state of oneself. Furthermore, it is believed that the world, our parents and society in general will carve away at our nature to shape a person. While those who study the Tao of the uncarved block seek to “uncarve” themselves and return to the state of a block of wood as nature intended, Fontenot finds himself in his own natural habitat taking an uncarved, square block of wood bringing out nature and the wildlife therein. In fact, his decoys are so realistic that many a duck and goose would have bet their life on the decoys being real. And many have.
Fontenot said that while hand-carved wooden decoys are part of a dying artform, it is one that has sustained life for families in Louisiana. He said that decoys have been utilized for thousands of years.
“Back in the early 1920s and 1930s, people carved their own because they couldn’t afford to buy them and they didn’t have any access to plastic decoys at that point,” said Fontenot. “So, they figured out a way to carve them out with a hatchet or chop them out however they could get the decoys. And they would use them to hunt over, to lure ducks in and to shoot them to feed their families.”
Being part of one of the first graduating classes at Alfred M. Barbe High School in the 1970s, Fontenot grew up in a plastic world. The promise of plastics during the mid-twentieth century was to create more durable products to retail at lower prices for the consumer. Duck decoys made of wood became a thing of yesteryear.
“As time progressed, plastic decoys came into the market and forced away the wooden decoys,” said Fontenot. “But there’s been a resurgence over the last 15 or 20 years of decoy carving as an artform, as a hobby and as a collectible. There’s a lot of collectors that collect decorative or working decoys.”
Fontentot said that he enjoys the process of making the wooden, working decoys for hunting. An avid hunter since the age of four, Fontenot now hunts for raw materials to carve, texturize, burn, shape, paint and finally to be weighted with lead. The final test for a working wooden decoy is throwing a weighted decoy out into a natural body of water to see if and how it floats.
Recently, Fontenot and his wife took his handcrafted decoys to Ocean City, Maryland for the Ward World Championship Wildfowl Carving Competition and Art Festival, which is an international event for carvers and collectors such as Fontenot. He submitted five of his decoys and four of them placed in the competition. Two of his works took first place. One decoy placed third, and another took honorable mention. The event saw several carvers from Louisiana, but Fontenot was the only one from Southwest Louisiana. Yet even after his accolades, Fontenot still does not consider himself a master carver.
“I would say that I’m a good, intermediate carver,” said Fontenot. “Up there in Maryland, I entered a couple of categories which are called ‘advanced’ and down here it’s considered ‘professional’, but since I’ve won a couple of Best in Show awards down here, I have to bump up to the Professional category. Not that I consider myself a professional, I just have to be a small fish in a big sea with the likes of a lot of real master carvers.”
His passion and labor of love keeps him in good standing with the Louisiana Wildfowl Carvers and Collectors Guild, which is in Mandeville. However, Fontenot gave all his inspirational credit to a Lake Charles master carver, Ronnie Chauvin, who started carving at the age of 14 in the Boy Scouts, carving totem poles for Camp Edgewood.
“I met a guy at an art show years ago at the Civic Center, and he had worked with Ronnie Chauvin and helped him,” said Fontenot. “So, I got in touch with Ronnie through this guy. I kept bothering and bugging Ronnie. And finally, he took me under his wing and let me watch him carve and show me his techniques.”
It was at that art show that Fontenot had a Eureka moment of inspiration. The natural wood textures on the carvings seemed to bring the ducks to life. With the organic buoyancy of wood and the known buoyancy of ducks and waterfowl, the combination seemed like a natural fit that plastics would fail to achieve. Fontenot said that the first wood-carved ducks that inspired him seemed so realistic as if they might take flight before his very eyes.
And so began Fontenot’s migration into a hobby, which then evolved into his passion projects. But with necessity being the mother of invention, Fontenot said that he needed those hand-carved decoys and wanted to purchase them on the spot at the art show.
“I told the artist that I wanted to buy his wooden decoys, and he told me how much they were but said he couldn’t sell them to me,” said Fontenot. “He said that he would put me on a waiting list and that it would be about a year and a half. I said to myself that I was not going to wait a year and a half, and I would love to figure out how to do this. I did taxidermy work for about 10 years after high school, and I knew then I wanted to transition into this.”
It was Fontenot’s own impatience that taught the Zen-like patience required to make a hand-carved, wooden decoy. He said he enjoys being a part of an art form that is thousands of years old. Not to mention, his decoys do, in fact, work at luring ducks.
“The Indians were carving decoys 2,000 years ago,” said Fontenot. “Indians would get straw and wrap a bunch of straw to pile up a duck head and tie them up and maybe put them on sticks in the water or the grass. But decoys have been around for thousands of years all over the world.”
In fact, the history of decoys as hunting tools dates to the ancient Egyptians, who used clay decoys on the Nile River circa 2500 BCE. Archaeological evidence has shown that Native Americans utilized feathers and plants to hunt waterfowl like ducks and geese sometime around 300 to 100 BCE. North American hunters and trappers have been using wooden decoys since the 19th century. The term “decoy,” which originates from a Dutch word meaning “cage duck,” suggests that tame birds were used to trap wild birds in the early history of hunting. Nowadays, it is common for hunters to use battery-powered, moving duck decoys on waterways to lure wild fowl.
Fontenot started his own business, VMF Decoys, based out of his home workshop. His decoys have lured avid hunters, and his work is currently in demand and back-order. Business has spread by word-of-mouth. VMF stands for Fontenot’s birth name: Vennice Mark Fontenot.
“A decoy can take anywhere from three months to a year,” he said. “I’ve got some orders lined up right now that I’m doing, so I really couldn’t take any more. But it’s still early for the upcoming duck season, now would be the best time to order. In other words, if someone wanted just a plain, slick block painted decoy. I could get a few decoys done between now and November.”
Fontenot sells his decoys at $300 each. Hunters and collectors value these decoys as they would fine art. While collectors may display hand carved decoys, hunters will gather what the decoys yield: wild game birds to be taxidermized and put on display in their home gallery.
Vision is key in any art form. Between the consumer, there is a shared vision. Fontenot’s favorite choice of wood to carve is from that of the Tupelo Gum Tree, or Black Tupelo, which has a fine texture, and is pale and strong. He then visualizes the duck within the uncarved block. He brings it out in time. Fontenot’s handiwork is a part of not just the artist’s nature, but nature itself.
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