Pancha Tantra – Walton Ford – Bill Buford Snelle Levering

At first glance, Walton Ford’s large-scale, highly-detailed watercolors of animals recall the prints of 19th-century illustrators John James Audubon and Edward Lear. A closer look reveals a complex anthropomorphic universe, full of symbols, sly jokes, and allusions to the ‘operatic’ nature of traditional natural history. In this stunning but sinister visual world, beasts and birds are not mere aesthetic objects but rather dynamic actors in allegorical struggles: a wild turkey crushes a small parrot in its …