Scan barcode
A review by carduelia_carduelis
Audubon, on the Wings of the World by Fabien Grolleau
3.0
If we've not met before, something you should know about me is that I really like birds. When I was a teenager I undertook an enormous 2-month project where I recreated Audubon's American magpie in coloured pencils on a giant piece of creamy A1. I spent hours stroking each quill onto the paper, pouring over highlights, rifling through Audubon's work to understand how he'd put similar birds to paper, how he might have enhanced the plummage on this one.
My artistic career faded but birds followed me into adulthood. When I first moved to the States, I was no longer greeted by the familiar calls of my beloved Blackbirds, Tits, and Chaffinches but by the squawks of Western Scrub Jays and the alarm-clock trill of the Black-headed Junco. The alien birds on this new continent pulled me back to Audubon, and I found myself revisiting his works as an adult. When I saw this book at the library, I had to pick it up.
In some ways I wish I hadn't.
Audubon seems to have been a bit of a twat.
He abandoned his family to pursue his drawings at a time when there was real danger in being a single mother. He endangered his staff, his apprentice. He shot dozens of the same bird for montages, hundreds over his career. He indulged in petty rivalry with a fellow artist.
He kept slaves,
which,
is resigned to an afterword in the book and doesn't make it into any panels of the graphic novel. Kind of hard to sell an historical figure to the general public when he's a slaveowner, so I guess we'll put that in smallprint at the back.
Aside from his... choices.. as a person, the book itself is just ok. The colouring and layout of each page is well thought out but, for a book about a man with such a distinct style, I found the inkwork to be very cartoonish and lacking both his precision and his flair. There is also little by way of a story when you ignore the questionable choices he makes. There are incredible episodes - literally, I don't believe they happened - which add a whimsy to the book but it's lacking in some depth. I did enjoy hearing about his feud with Alexander Wilson but struggled to see it as anything but Audubon's creation.
Ultimately, I'm left a little hollow by this work. It's easily accessible, and short, but packs little punch and skirts around the harder issues. Audubon, it seems, is another disturbing figure in history that is better judged by his art than his character.
A comparison of Wilson and Audubon's renditions of the same bird, a Carolina Parrot.
My artistic career faded but birds followed me into adulthood. When I first moved to the States, I was no longer greeted by the familiar calls of my beloved Blackbirds, Tits, and Chaffinches but by the squawks of Western Scrub Jays and the alarm-clock trill of the Black-headed Junco. The alien birds on this new continent pulled me back to Audubon, and I found myself revisiting his works as an adult. When I saw this book at the library, I had to pick it up.
In some ways I wish I hadn't.
Audubon seems to have been a bit of a twat.
He abandoned his family to pursue his drawings at a time when there was real danger in being a single mother. He endangered his staff, his apprentice. He shot dozens of the same bird for montages, hundreds over his career. He indulged in petty rivalry with a fellow artist.
He kept slaves,
which,
is resigned to an afterword in the book and doesn't make it into any panels of the graphic novel. Kind of hard to sell an historical figure to the general public when he's a slaveowner, so I guess we'll put that in smallprint at the back.
Aside from his... choices.. as a person, the book itself is just ok. The colouring and layout of each page is well thought out but, for a book about a man with such a distinct style, I found the inkwork to be very cartoonish and lacking both his precision and his flair. There is also little by way of a story when you ignore the questionable choices he makes. There are incredible episodes - literally, I don't believe they happened - which add a whimsy to the book but it's lacking in some depth. I did enjoy hearing about his feud with Alexander Wilson but struggled to see it as anything but Audubon's creation.
Ultimately, I'm left a little hollow by this work. It's easily accessible, and short, but packs little punch and skirts around the harder issues. Audubon, it seems, is another disturbing figure in history that is better judged by his art than his character.
A comparison of Wilson and Audubon's renditions of the same bird, a Carolina Parrot.