“My idea,” he said, “was to make an island out of thylacines and killed sheep-they’re not on an island they are the island-and to have it sinking beneath the waves. A few of the thylacines had lambs or parts of lambs in their jaws, but others seemed to be biting and tearing viciously at one another. The last known one died in captivity in the nineteen-thirties, but they lived on in people’s imagination.”įord’s painting, which was spread across three large sheets of paper pinned to the wall, showed a roiling pyramid of murderous animals, lightly blocked out in washes of yellow ochre and raw umber. The settlers put a bounty on these animals and began killing them off in every possible way-poison, traps, snares, guns. The settlers were sheepherders, and they built up this myth of a huge, bipedal, nocturnal vampire-beast that sucked the blood of sheep. “It looked like a wolf, but with stripes, like a tiger, and they could get up on their hind legs, which made them even scarier. “This animal scared the hell out of the settlers,” Ford said, exuberantly. Their violent extinction is the central drama of Walton Ford’s latest painting, a huge and surpassingly weird watercolor whose early stages I observed during several visits last fall to his ramshackle, barnlike studio in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Long extinct on the mainland, carnivorous thylacines survived on the island of Tasmania into the early years of the twentieth century, when the settlers finished them off. It was a thylacine, a marsupial cousin to kangaroos and wallabies, which evolved over several million years, in the forests of Australia and New Guinea, into a fearsome apex predator. The Tasmanian wolf, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was neither a wolf nor a tiger.

Walton ford taschen