(via mefi) I like this guy. Very strange, indeed. Andrew Long says "Painter Walton Ford's vivid and fantastical watercolors explore the conundrums of human nature through the imagery of the animal kingdom." Conundrum is right, when you look at his other works. Another tidbit from a 2001 interview with the artist: In the watercolor American Flamingo (1992), for example, Ford's hot-pink bird is just as contorted as a famous one of Audubon's (who often used foreshortening and compression to fit his subjects onto his page), but his specimen has had its legs shot out from under it by a sharpshooter in the distance and is in death throes, spurting blood. This is not your grandmother's Audubon.
But it's a facet that Ford finds most compelling. "When Audubon went to paint the golden eagle," he says didactically, as if to indicate another entertaining sermon coming on, "he got a living specimen, and he couldn't figure out how to kill it. He didn't want to harm the plumage or make it suffer, he said, too much, so he put it in a closet with a fire of charcoal burning and he tried to smoke it to death. And when that didn't work he put sulfur on the flames and tried to smoke it to death with fumes of sulfur. And for three or four days he left it in his closet, and when he came back it was still just staring at him. So he took a long steel pin, or wire actually, and he sharpened it, and drove it into the animals' heart, which killed it instantly. And as he then drew the eagle he was stuck by a violent fever and almost died. It took him fourteen days to finish drawing this bird, which, I was thinking, by the end of the fourteenth day must have been rotten, really rank. So all that imagery sunk into my head: Oh my God, he's trying to suffocate birds with smoke and sulfur, driving pins into their hearts, drawing them for fourteen days, and then falling into some dreadful fever himself-it's not the Audubon that you're thinking about with 'the Audubon Society.' It's just not cute. And I'd rather read about that Audubon, that flipped-out guy who's trying to gas eagles."Lord almighty.
