In 1833, John James Audubon tried to paint a golden eagle, but he had trouble killing the bird. The explorer, classifier, and sometimes-artist tried electricity and poisonous smoke, but to no avail; he finally succeeded in sticking the bird through the heart with a straight piece of steel. In a New York magazine article 179 years later, the painter Walton Ford described wanting to make a response painting. “My picture will have the eagle trying to escape, the fox trap on its leg, this horrible burning smoke coming out of its mouth. It’ll be thinking, Like, what the fuck do I have to do to get away from this asshole?”

      This November, more than 50 of Ford’s large-scale watercolors will be on display
at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Even those unfamiliar with Ford will quickly pick up on the strained, practically tortured, relationship he has to 19th century naturalists. It’s no surprise, really, that an anti-imperialist painter of birds and animals would pit himself against those who sketched and categorized the flora and fauna of the “new” North American continent. But while there are few explicitly Audubon-derived images in Ford’s oeuvre, Delirium (2004), inspired by this incident with the golden eagle, is one remarkable example. On its own it would merit the voyage to Brooklyn.

      Ford doesn’t have to be in direct dialogue with America’s most famous naturalist to fill his canvases with tortured creatures of all shapes and sizes. Take Nila (1999-2000). Broken into 22 rectangles of different sizes, each framing a portion of the larger watercolor, it depicts the eponymous Indian elephant under siege. Birds perch on every part of him. A rooster balances on his sawed-off tusk. An owl crouches on his shoulder blades. A turkey vulture sits on his rump. A flock of European starlings ride him like barnacles on a whale; two copulate on his distended, grotesque penis. And along the bottom of it all, Ford’s spidery handwriting spells out the scientific names of the bird and animal actors.

      Nila is indisputably sublime, inducing terror and glee—terror in the romantic sublime sense, expressed through the concrete precision of Ford’s draftsmanship, the dazzle of Nila’s corrugated trunk and the gloss of the birds’ haughty feathers; glee in the childlike sense, with a superabundance of detail, the giddy, dawning realization that each of the panels is separate, and separately named (“Nostalgia,” “Crack of Dawn,” “Premonitions of midnight,” The Abbë’s revenge”), the viewer reveling in the delight of spindly drawings and notations on empty spaces that hold even more mysteries. This is the glee of the archivist, or the curious kid who just read a bunch of Nancy Drews and is now poking around in her grandma’s attic, about to pull out the box of old yellow letters—a clue.