WALTON FORD:​​ I started out just painting these things
that looked like Audubons.
They were like fake Audubons,
but I twisted the subject matter a bit,
and got inside his head and tried to paint it
as if it was really his tortured soul,
as if his hand betrayed him and he painted
what he didn't want to expose about himself.
So I did start doing those
and it was very important to me then
to make them look like Audubons,
to make them look like they were a hundred years old,
to make them look like he painted them,
but that they escaped out of him without, you know,
almost like a picture Dorian Gray, but you know,
a natural history image.
The whole print project seemed like the natural fruition
of all the other stuff that I do.
Look at that.
Peter: Yeah, it's good.
-: Beautious.
All the folios of natural history prints
started out as watercolors that were done
in the field or done from nature,
and they ended up as prints
that were bound and sold by subscription,
and it makes sense to make them the way
that Peter and I make them.
-: We've been working on these prints for over five years,
and the idea of doing the prints in this size
was that we wanted as much as possible
to mimic the Audubon Double Folio Birds of America book.
And we wanted to work in some of those same techniques
that Audubon would've used to make those prints.
All of our prints are done with six or seven plates,
and separate colors on every plate
and probably much more saturated color
than Audubon would've ever used.
(gears creaking)
That's a part, I think, of Walton's way of picking up
what Audubon did, but also changing it
and distorting it a little bit,
kinda turning up the irony a little bit. (laughs)
Walton: Wow.
-: That was good.
-: Yeah, that's juicy!
Psychedelic.
This looks cool.
The registration looks pretty good.
-: That's good.
Yeah, that's encouraging 'cause
we're starting to get the feel of it, I think.
-: It's a pretty nice print, like generally just for.
Peter: That blue is really
more intense, isn't it?
Yeah, it's nice.
(Peter laughing) Dig it!
I like it.
Yeah, it's in.
When I was a kid I loved to draw.
And I was a little kind of amateur naturalist,
identifying birds and catching snakes and keeping weird pets.
This museum was like heaven to me.
I think that the dioramas here are works of art.
For an artist it was really great that those animals didn't move.
I could look at them in a way that you can't look at animals in the zoo
or animals on nature shows.
I could really see how they were put together.
Passenger pigeons were the most numerous bird on the planet Earth.
A single flock could have 2 billion birds in it.
There were such huge numbers of these birds
that it was frightening.
When they land in forests,
they break great trees in half.
And the crap would fall like snow the whole time.
And it was thought that they were inexhaustible,
so they were hunted like mad.
This is a series of photographs
that was taken in 1898.
I like doing these little research trips.
It’s like play-acting for me to pretend to be one of these
English natural history guys that are both heroes and villains.
There's an image in here
of a full grown male passenger pigeon
very beautifully posed, very proud bird.
I think it sort of foretells disaster.
It looks like because it's under lit,
it's already a ghost or a monster or somehow
There's some dark, dark undercurrent
to this photo that's very beautiful.
There's many insane kind of like narratives
that have to do with the passenger pigeon.
They were so numerous that
everyone who saw them was sort of blown away by them.
And I have some quotes that I ended up
putting on a painting.
Here they are.
This is one of the earliest descriptions from 1637.
"Millions of turtle doves on green bows,
"which sat pecking of the full right pleasant crepes
"that were supported by the lusty trees,
"whose fruitful load did cause the arms to bend."
The big thing I’m always looking for in my work
is a sort of attraction-repulsion,
where the stuff is beautiful to begin with until you notice
that some sort of horrible violence is about to happen
or is in the middle of happening.
The original impulse is to make a sort of like,
nasty little underground cartoon on a really large scale.
I had a lot of fun sort of making these vignettes.
They’re satisfying all their lusts
and all their cravings and all their crazy desires
like as they are going down,
and to me there is just some sort of black humor in that.
There is like these guys - the eggs are coming out
and as they are coming out they are being stolen.
And then it's fun to have them void on each other
and to have them murder each other.
The little one is falling out of the nest.
It’s a dark humor, but it makes me chuckle when I'm doing it.
There is this sort of Hudson River,
kind of beautiful landscape.
And then over here there's some indication
of maybe previous destruction,
branches that have broken down.
And here come the huge flocks, you know.
And this is the scary part,
the sort of weather system moving in
of these enormous flocks of birds.
When I started doing sketches for this
and I realized that the angle I was gonna paint it at,
and the sort of way I was gonna paint it,
it would almost seemed like it was just floating,
like a sort of strange dream-like,
slow-motion kind of falling.
And that dream-like quality gave me all this room
to pack it with all this narrative
that seems to happen sort of independent of the fact
that this thing is crashing down.
The painting I’m working on now is uh,
it’s a MONKEY BANQUET basically.
And it’s part of a series that has to do with
this mid-19th century explorer, Sir Richard Burton.
One of the stories that I was reading about him
that stuck with me was this one about
these monkeys he kept in his quarters
when he was a young British officer
and I’m gonna read a quote:
“He gathered together forty monkeys of various ages
and species and installed them in his house
in an attempt to compile a vocabulary of monkey language.
And one tiny one, very pretty, small and silky looking monkey
he used to call his wife.”
I painted the wife individually,
and I named it ‘The Forsaken.’
She sits in a tree and she looks all heartbroken and bereft
because she’s been abandoned by her lover.
“They all sat down on chairs at mealtimes
and the servants waited on them
and each had its bowl and plate with the food and drink proper for them.
He sat at the head of the table
and the pretty little monkey sat by him in a baby’s high chair.”
That’s just too good.
"He had a list of about 60 words
"before the experiment was concluded."
And to me this, this is just what I’m looking for
when I’m doing all this reading.
I do a lot of research and this thing has almost everything in it.
There’s an erotic kind of fascination to it.
There’s something that strikes me as humorous
in a quintessentially super-eccentric British way.
When these paintings leave my studio,
a lot of times I don't ever get to see 'em again.
I painted this picture about two years ago,
and I was happy that I still liked it
'cause a lot of times you come back to
work you did a while ago and can't bear it.
The drawing I did first is of this elephant,
this glorious elephant.
And then I divided it in a sort of Mondrian fashion
into all these different -
into a very, what I thought an elegant, abstract composition of rectangles.
And in each rectangle I decided what to do.
The idea of dividing it up into bits had to do with
the parable about the blind man and the elephant,
where each blind man grabs a hold of a different part of the elephant,
and the one that grabs the tusk says, well,
I know what an elephant is:
he’s smooth, hard, kind of like polished wood.
And then one grabs the leg and says, no, no, no, it’s…
an elephant is like a tree, it’s like a tree trunk.
And the tail, the guy says, well, it’s like a paintbrush.
And the guy who has the nose says it’s like a snake.
So I had this idea of having the elephant divided up into bits
that wouldn’t identify it as an elephant all by itself,
and have each one of those things framed individually.
And then have a different species of bird inhabit that little frame,
and do his thing within it.
And it’s like he doesn’t,
he doesn’t see any of the other elements
so he can’t put the whole picture together.
It’s too vast for one person to picture.
I wanted to make sort of the largest watercolors ever.
Ultimately that becomes fun all by itself.
It took about nine months to paint.
All of this makes it sound like I have this great kind of
intellectual reason for making these things,
but ultimately I want to paint a sexy monkey,
and I want to paint a big, huge you know elephant with an erection.
Why?
Why do I feel the need to make these things?
Why is it that you want to make them as disturbing as you can?
Or make them as violent and out of control as you can?
I like kind of overwrought emotion, melodrama,
very 19th-century modes of communicating.
I’m not a minimalist, I’m a maximalist.
The more you throw at it the better.
It’s a sort of a wasteland out there.
I want to do rich things,
I want to make rich dishes and put them out there.