Existing comment:
Fables for Tomorrow
"It is not only fine feathers that make fine birds."
-- Aesop
Although artists have been depicting birds for centuries, many would argue that John James Audubon was the first to effectively connect the art and science of avian imagery in his landmark publication, The Birds of America. Unlike earlier ornithological catalogues, Audubon's illustrations favor realism over didacticism and imbue the bird subjects with human emotion and expressivity. Audubon's birds recall the literary tradition of animal allegory that has inspired the work on view here.
In a sense, artists Walton Ford and David Beck are heir to Audubon's legacy. With one foot in the art world and another in the natural world, their artworks tell stories that are as human as they are avian. Over the last twenty years, Walton Ford has created more than one hundred paintings and prints with birds as the primary subject. Ford's avian portraits double as complex allegories, blending depictions of nature with historical events and sociopolitical commentary. David Beck's empathetic depictions of the extinct dodo have their own moralizing message about an ill-fated bird whose life and death are now intertwined with human history. |