Walton Ford

Walton Ford (born 1960 in Larchmont, New York) is an American artist who paints large scale watercolors in the style of Audubon's naturalist illustrations. Each painting is a meticulous study in flora and fauna, while being filled with symbols, clues and jokes referencing a multitude of texts from colonial literature and folktales to travel guides. Ford's paintings are complex narratives that critique the history of colonialism, industrialism, politics, natural science, and humanity's effect on the environment. He is also a pioneer of large scaled multi-layered etchings which many people mistake for paintings due to their meticulous and fastidious execution.

Walton Ford appropriates the crisp, descriptive style of 19th-century naturalists and artists—John James Audubon, Karl Bodmer, George Catlin—but he puts their conventions to work in an investigation of natural history itself.

Repurposing a field-guide aesthetic, Ford composes dense allegories that make sometimes pointed, sometimes sidelong allusions to everything from conservationism and consumption to war, politics and imperialism.

While staying uncannily faithful to the natural history mode, Ford paints on a much larger scale, producing outsize watercolors with epic compositions. He renders his scenes with operatic drama, capturing moments when the natural order changes, such as the last member of a species struggling just before extinction.”

Ford left the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island in 1982 with a BFA degree.

Walton Ford is the recipient of several national awards and honors including a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and is one of the artists profiled on the PBS series Art:21. He had his first major one-man show at the Brooklyn Museum in 2006 and is currently represented by the Paul Kasmin Gallery in Manhattan.

After living in New York City for more than 10 years, Ford moved his family and studio to Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

Monographs

• Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra Taschen Books, Köln, Germany 2nd edition: 2009 ISBN 978-3-8228-5237-8
• Walton Ford: Tigers of Wrath, Horses of Instruction Harry N. Abrams Book, 2002

External links

• Biography, interviews, essays, artwork images and video clips from PBS series Art:21 -- Art in the Twenty-First Century - Season 2 (2003).
• Exclusive video of "Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford" on uVu
• Artist Profile, Jan 26, 2009 from The New Yorker