Bowdoin College Museum of Art | - Ornithomancy No. 3

Preview image of work. watercolor, gouache, ink and pencil on paper , Ornithomancy No. 3 12862

2002.1

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Ornithomancy No. 3

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Artist

Walton Ford (White Plains, New York, 1960 - )

Title

Ornithomancy No. 3

Creation Date

2000

Century

early 21st century

Dimensions

25 7/8 in. x 19 in. (65.72 cm x 48.26 cm)

Object Type

watercolor

Creation Place

North America, United States, New York

Medium and Support

watercolor, gouache, ink and pencil on paper

Credit Line

Gift of Laura-Lee Whittier Woods, in memory of John Stuart Fallow, Jr., Class of 1948

Copyright

This artwork may be under copyright. For further information, please consult the Museum’s Copyright Terms and Conditions.

Accession Number

2002.1

Ford’s haunting images of animals are born from reading rather than from observation. It was a passage from “The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night,” in the translation by English geographer and Orientalist Richard Burton, that prompted this watercolor: “And know thou that the son of Adam circumventeth the fishes and draweth them forth of the seas; and he shooteth the birds with a pellet of clay, and trappeth the elephant with his craft. None is safe from his mischief and neither bird nor beast escapeth him . . .” The style and scale of Ford’s work invite comparison with John James Audubon’s “Birds of America” (1827--38), which offers 435 life-size renditions of birds in watercolored plates. But the sinister scene of two wounded, entangled, male wood ducks at water’s edge is a decidedly contemporary comment on the continuing abuses of nature.