"Man and Beast"

I've found an awesome post from the New Yorker about an artist, Walton Ford, in Massachusetts.  Walton's story and the New Yorker's telling of it is particularly fascinating for me a relevant to this class: he paints the Tasmanian Tiger or Tasmanian Wolf in an artistically thoughtful way.  As many of us know, the tiger went extinct at the hand of the European settlers in the early part of the twentieth century.  As Ford describes to the writer, "The settlers were sheephereders, and they built up this myth of a huge, bipedal, nocturnal vampire-beast that sucked the blood of sheep. The settlers put a bounty on these animals and began killing them off in every possible way--poison, traps, snares, guns.  The last known one died in captivity in the nineteen-thirties, but the lived on in people's imagination."

This history of violent extinction and culture is precisely what he uses his art to point out (something I personally very much respect, admire, and attempt to relate to).  As we can see in the pictures above, he choses to paint the tigers in a violent pile floating in the water: an island of tigers.  He deliberately shows the picture of the tigers that the settlers created even though it is wrong.  His words are better than mine: "I want it to be a brutal picture of thylacine bloodlust, a blame-the-victim picture, a sort of fever dream of the Tasmanian settler alone in the bush with these animals, although there was never any evidence of one killing a human being, and very little evidence of their eating sheep."

His art is fascinating because of the way it takes advantage of human and animal relationships throughout history and the depth with which he studies these relationships for his art.  Also, he uses a considerably large scale for the medium he is painting in (watercolor) which is also noteworthy and very artistically powerful.

I'm really excited about this artist and this article, if you couldn't already tell. I really love that it combines an intellectually powerful art form with the academics of our class.  Please let me know if you want to discuss this with me!!

Brittany Hallawell

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/01/26/man-and-beast