Meet Joe Hooven

I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When I was young, my dad decided to move our family out of Philadelphia, even as people around him said it wouldn't work. It did. and I spent my childhood outside because of it. I was hunting before I was old enough to carry a gun, and I never stopped. It's been part of my life for as long as I can remember, season after season, year after year.  Most of my hunting has been close to home in Pennsylvania, but every year, my family and I also make a trip out to Texas to hunt together. Art came just as early, and just as naturally. I went to art school, and for a long time hunting and art stayed completely separate, two things I loved that never had any reason to overlap.

Then my brother started finding deer skulls out in the woods, and I decided to paint one, mostly just to see what would happen. It worked. I painted another, then another, and eventually people who knew me started asking if I'd do the same with skulls of their own — not ones found in the woods, but trophies from their own hunts, animals that actually meant something to them. Most of the pieces I work on now come from hunters themselves: trophies people bring me from their own hunts, ready to become something more than a mount on the wall.

Every skull is unique — a record of something that once lived. Through color and pattern, each piece is transformed and brought back to life in a new way.