The Gallant Chief: Audubon's Whooping Crane
A MONA Moment |
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With pages more than three feet long by two feet wide, John James Audubon's great project, The Birds of America, was the largest book produced in the world up to its time. Size was important to Audubon, the artist, for it was his intent to render each of the 435 bird species it would depict life size, and in habitat.
Despite the ample dimensions of the paper, at over five feet tall when standing erect, the Whooping Crane presented Audubon with a compositional challenge: How to fit the tallest bird on the North American continent into the arbitrary confines of a two foot by three foot frame.
His solution merges design, composition and color into a seamless balance of elegance and power, all sublimated into a single, potent image. He resolves the problem of size through design. The visual impact inherent in the Crane's size is compacted into a taut, stooped, posture suggesting the specie's voracious appetite and rapacious nature, their persistence in pursuing their quarry until, as Audubon describes, "they reach the object of their desire, which they greedily devour."
This drama is succinctly and dramatically realized. The hapless, baby alligators in the foreground are caught in the pincers of a compositional triangle Audubon creates starting with the business end of the claw closest to us, hovering ominously over the soft white underbelly of the prostrate alligator. Picture the triangle angle starting here at the claw, its right line running through the Crane's legs up to the tail-feathers; angled left through the torso then angled down through the neck to those dangerous looking, razor's edged beaks, opened in their own triangle of scissors looming over the head of the alligator preparing for decapitation.
The strong pull of our eyes along the lines of this invisible triangle lead us inevitably to the main elements of this drama in the foreground. And, with a Spielbergian flair for one last bravura effect, Audubon casts a shaft of sunlight on the prostrate alligator in the foreground, pathetic in its helpless submission. Here the soft sweet white meat of its underside glows in the spotlight, looking small and inconsequential in the shadow of the huge clawed feet of the crane, which, from the baby alligator's point of view, have all the lethal potency of a Jurassic Raptor. Hovering off the ground, just inches above the alligator, the Crane's claws draw together in a lethal, three pronged spear, aimed at the chest of the alligator, the joint of its leg pulled back like a slingshot, ready to release those arrow-like claws in swift, deadly, finality.
Lest we become too caught up in the stagecraft, Audubon's strong counterpoint to the drama is the Crane's essential elegance, and beauty of form. From the center of the left wing a heart of pure white glows, with delicate shadings of off white radiating out from it. Delicate, graphite lines render the rhythmic layering of feathers, the perfection of the streamlined curve of the black tipped wing, the surprise of the soft tufted tail feathers, downy and playful. In these textural elements the essential majesty of the Crane emerges. In this light, is it coincidence? That deep regal blue sky of the background outlining the Crane's torso?
Perhaps not, as we hear Audubon's voice from his Ornithological Biography describing the Crane in distinctly royal terms.
Reader see the majestic Bird shake its feathers, and again arrange them in order. Proud of its beautiful form, and prouder still of its power of flight, it stalks over the withering grasses with all the majesty of a gallant chief.
