So, I have been reading the book “John James Audubon: The Making of an American” by Richard Rhodes over the past couple of weeks. For anyone who doesn’t know, I typically try to read nonfiction when I am trying to write something myself. I am far too prone to copying rhythm and voice unconsciously if I read fiction while I am trying to write fiction. Or, at the very least, I start comparing my first drafts to writers like Vonnegut and Hemingway— which isn’t fun for anybody and leads to a lot of abandoned paragraphs.
Basically, my “fun” reading over the past few years has been lots of biographies (Franklin, Lincoln, Einstein) some other pieces (Mayflower) and the occasional artist bio, or critical work thrown in (Matisse, Picasso, Courbet). Of course, I don’t like to read artist bios while I am painting as I start comparing my sketches to de Kooning’s, which is also no fun for anyone.
All that said, I came across a passage in the Audubon book last night that reminded me lots and lots of the video on Rauschenberg I posted last time. From page 211, where Rhodes writes:
“He had more in mind than simply scientific illustration: he meant to make art. Art, an older discipline than science, would substitute its reverberant verisimilitude for the life the bird had lost, revivifying it just as he had fantasized in childhood. Restoring life to the inanimate was an emerging theme in the cultural dialogue of the day, a hope projected perhaps from the transforming success of technology.”
Interesting to me here was the idea of Audubon, who truly loved birds, killing them to pose them for the sake of art… and some 130-140 years later (the passage is dealing with Audubon in about 1822) Rauschenberg talking about giving ongoing eternal life to an animal that was seemingly hunted and stuffed. Of course, the idea of giving life to the inanimate (whether the page, the paint, the sculpture, etc.) is likely inherent in all art (the act of the artist becoming creator for a moment), but this concurrent theme of reviving the hunted prey, or allowing the death of the hunted prey for the idea to live eternally is so similar in each of these artists it was hard not to say something about it here.
It has been especially interesting to me to consider Audubon in terms of art, which I really hadn’t before. I’d picked up the book thinking of an immigrant tracking through early America… and had likely considered him a scientist and a naturalist more than anything. I also had some vague idea of him spending time in Key West at some point… so I was interested in that.
But, of course, I was silly not to think of him as artist first. And his life in art, and independence in art, is interesting in relation to Courbet— the free-spirited artist traipsing through the countryside and free from the trappings of the bourgeois life. The big difference being that Courbet used it as a marketing technique and Audubon seems more intent on survival— feeling his artistic skills to be his most marketable talent. All while pursuing new birds feverishly. What would my portfolio be like if I walked nearly 20 miles a day in order to draw?
There may be some underlying claim here that Audubon was pure American and pure artist, and somehow intertwined as the first of each, and for that reason it is an interesting read.
Above, see some pics of Audubon’s work. The first is from Smithsonian.com and the second is from the University of Delaware Library.
Basically, my “fun” reading over the past few years has been lots of biographies (Franklin, Lincoln, Einstein) some other pieces (Mayflower) and the occasional artist bio, or critical work thrown in (Matisse, Picasso, Courbet). Of course, I don’t like to read artist bios while I am painting as I start comparing my sketches to de Kooning’s, which is also no fun for anyone.
All that said, I came across a passage in the Audubon book last night that reminded me lots and lots of the video on Rauschenberg I posted last time. From page 211, where Rhodes writes:
“He had more in mind than simply scientific illustration: he meant to make art. Art, an older discipline than science, would substitute its reverberant verisimilitude for the life the bird had lost, revivifying it just as he had fantasized in childhood. Restoring life to the inanimate was an emerging theme in the cultural dialogue of the day, a hope projected perhaps from the transforming success of technology.”
Interesting to me here was the idea of Audubon, who truly loved birds, killing them to pose them for the sake of art… and some 130-140 years later (the passage is dealing with Audubon in about 1822) Rauschenberg talking about giving ongoing eternal life to an animal that was seemingly hunted and stuffed. Of course, the idea of giving life to the inanimate (whether the page, the paint, the sculpture, etc.) is likely inherent in all art (the act of the artist becoming creator for a moment), but this concurrent theme of reviving the hunted prey, or allowing the death of the hunted prey for the idea to live eternally is so similar in each of these artists it was hard not to say something about it here.
It has been especially interesting to me to consider Audubon in terms of art, which I really hadn’t before. I’d picked up the book thinking of an immigrant tracking through early America… and had likely considered him a scientist and a naturalist more than anything. I also had some vague idea of him spending time in Key West at some point… so I was interested in that.
But, of course, I was silly not to think of him as artist first. And his life in art, and independence in art, is interesting in relation to Courbet— the free-spirited artist traipsing through the countryside and free from the trappings of the bourgeois life. The big difference being that Courbet used it as a marketing technique and Audubon seems more intent on survival— feeling his artistic skills to be his most marketable talent. All while pursuing new birds feverishly. What would my portfolio be like if I walked nearly 20 miles a day in order to draw?
There may be some underlying claim here that Audubon was pure American and pure artist, and somehow intertwined as the first of each, and for that reason it is an interesting read.
Above, see some pics of Audubon’s work. The first is from Smithsonian.com and the second is from the University of Delaware Library.
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