PBS高端访谈:动物之间的联系（在线收听）

AMNA NAWAZ: Tonight's Brief But Spectacular features painter Walton Ford, whose work examines our relationship to animals in the wild, who, as he puts it, would rather be left alone. This episode is part of our ongoing arts and culture series, Canvas.

WALTON FORD, Painter: I make very large watercolors. Half the time you're at the zoo, you're saying, oh, man, those things are a lot weirder-looking than thought, or that's a lot bigger than I thought it was, or those are smaller than I remembered them. So I put them right in your face. And when you go to the show, you really do feel that. Everybody gets a little overwhelmed when they're faced with one of these things. Growing up in the suburbs, I felt like everything was manicured. I had a fantasy about being immersed in the wild. And going to the Museum of Natural History, I would lose myself in those dioramas. And I would bring a sketchbook, even when I was a little kid, and draw the animals in the museum dioramas and just lose myself in that. That's the first stuff that I did. That's the stuff that came out from inside of me. That was my, that was what was there. Then I went to art school. It didn't feel cool. It's easy to have contempt for what you're really good at. And what I was really good at was drawing and painting in a rather traditional way, and also thinking and relating to animals in the natural world. The art world had no place for somebody who was making work like this. After I got out of Rhode Island School of Design, trying to be a sort of artist that I wasn't, and I returned to the stuff that I did when I was a kid, that's actually when things started really going well for me. I look at my work as a sort of meditation on the sort of cultural history of our relationship with animals, especially animals that would rather be left alone. Because my subject matter can be grim, the best paintings that I make have a sort of dark humor in them. Sir Richard Burton, the African explorer, kept a collection of monkeys.

He gave them all human roles, anthropomorphic roles. I deliberately altered the behavior of the monkey to accommodate Richard Burton's twisted view of how he was training these monkeys and learning their language. And so those paintings could be as heavy or as light as you want them to be, because they are amusing to look at. Well, I have a series of paintings I have been more working on for many years about a female black panther that escaped from the Zurich Zoo in 1933. She was loose in the Swiss countryside in the dead of winter for, like, 10 weeks. That's the kind of thing I'm looking for. I'm looking for stories that are so much better than stuff that I could make up. And then I'm making stuff up from that place. My name is Walton Ford, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on the imagined animal.

阿姆纳·纳瓦兹：今晚的《简短而精彩》请到了画家沃尔顿·福特，他的作品审视了野生动物之间的关系。他认为，野生动物们更希望自己静静。本期节目是是帆布系列报道的部分艺术文化的部分内容。

沃尔顿·福特，画家：我会做一些很大的水彩画。在公园里的时候，总有那么一半的时间里，你会觉得：这里的事物看起来比人类想的更奇怪，而且也比我之前想的大很多，或者比我记忆中的要小。所以，我把它们放在大家的眼前。我们去参加秀的时候，会真切地感受到这一点。所有人在面临这样的事情时都会有冲击感。在郊区长大的我感觉所有事物都是经过修整的。关于沉浸在野生的世界中，我曾有一个奇妙的幻想。去美国自然历史博物馆的时候，我会迷失在展品之中。我会带着写生簿，即便在我还小的时候，我会在博物馆的展品中看到许多动物，并迷失于其中。这是我做过的第一件事。这件事展现了我的内心深处。这表明我对野生世界天生就有的兴趣。后来，我去了艺术学校。艺术学校感觉不是很好。很容易就让我对自己擅长的事情产生了鄙夷。我特别擅长的是以特别传统的方式来绘画，此外还有做与野生动物有关的思考。艺术世界容不下做这样作品的人。我从罗德岛设计学院毕业后，就试着成为我并不适合的那种艺术家，我重新回到了自己小时候做的事情上。那时候开始，一切变得顺利自然。我在审视作品的时候是带着一种冥想感看待我们与动物关系的文化历史的，尤其是喜欢独处静静的动物。因为我的主题可能是残忍的，所以我做的最好的画是有某种黑色幽默的元素在其中的。非洲探险家理查德·伯顿收集了许多猴子。

他给了这些猴子拟人化的角色。我特意转变了猴子的行为，想要适应理查德·伯顿关于自己训练猴子并学习猴子语言的扭曲看法。这些画可能跟你希望的一样或轻或重，因为他们看起来很有娱乐性。我有一些画是我历时多年创作的，内容与1933年逃出苏黎世动物园的磁性黑豹有关。他在瑞士乡村孤寂的冬天里过的很惬意，待了大概10周的样子。这是我在追寻的事情。我在追寻一些比我本身创作更好的素材。然后我再基于此进行创作。我是沃尔顿·福特，这是我本期分享的与想象动物有关的《简短而精彩》。