FINE ART CONNOISSEUR
Walton Ford's Not-So-Peaceable Kingdom
This month the American artist Walton Ford (b. 1960) returns to the limelight at New York City's Paul Kasmin Gallery with his irresistible blend of exquisite craftsmanship, teasing allegory, and provacative subject matter drawn from the animal kingdom. Over the past decade, Ford's reputation has been growing as one of the premier naturalist painters of our time - indeed, of any time...
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THE NEW YORK SUN
Back to Basics: Painters Walton Ford and Neo Rach flaunt their artistic conservatism in the face of modern provocateurs
What should be made of the conservatism of artists such as Walton Ford and Neo Rauch, who are subjects of shows of new work in Chelsea right now? The art world that prizes these men's work is a self-consciously cutting-edge milieu that is far removed from political conservatism...
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TIME OUT NEW YORK
Walton Ford
Walton Ford's detailed watercolor allegories of birds and other symbolically laden creatures have been called "Audubon on Viagra." While Ford is clear about the draw of both nature and sex as subjects- for example, he regrets the "great bummer of natural selection" that birds don't have penises for him to paint- his interest in Audubon is more...
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THE NEW YORK SUN
Nature Without Nurture
Walton Ford's new watercolors depicting animals in struggle are on view at Paul Kasmin Gallery. His paintings of birds of prey and powerful mammals were inspired by sources such as an early memory of Leonardo da Vinci's and the death of Irish Renaissance man Sir William Hamilton's pet...
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ARTNET
Super Natural History
It's the day after Walton Ford's birthday, and 20 days until the opening of his show at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York (an exhibition that is now on view, May 20-July 2, 2005). The two of us are in his second floor studio, which is located in a house at the end of a dirt road in the beautiful Berkshire..
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
America the Beautifully Absurd
On a recent Sunday, Walton Ford was searching for his 17th-century bestiary, one of several sources for his animal paintings. As he poked around his chaotic studio, overlooking a former lumberyard here, he cheerfully reeled off tale after tale about what he has sought and what he has...
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THE NEW YORK TIMES
"A Naturalist Painter Evokes Legends of the Past"
"Hi, this is a message for Walton Ford," the voice on the answering machine began. "My name is Anthony, from Santa Barbarar, and I have an egg" - pause - "of the extinct elephant bird, aepyornis..."
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MEN'S VOGUE
Built Ford Tough
Practically every hiker on the Long Trail in Vermont- the nation's first walking trail- carries at least one heavy item that he cannot do without. The 270-mile trail, which follows the Green Mountains along the high ridge from the Massachusetts to the Canadian border, is rocky and spare, and the trail is cut not like the broad mule-path avenues of the Pacific Crest but Yankee style, following stream beds no wider than this page and going straight up boulders and over craggy roots with rough...
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ARTNEWS
Birds That Sing A Different Tune
In Walton Ford's painting Falling Bough (2002), a horde of passenger pigeons crowds on a tree branch that has sheared off and is tumbling under their weight. The birds appear to be realistically depicted, but look closely and you see very unbirdlike behavior: acts that seem to come out of Bosch's Ship of Fools or Brueghel's Seven Deadly...
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PREVIEW CONNECTICUT
Animal Planet
It was once the case that from time to time animals would be found guilty of a crime, and would accordingly, suffer the punishment. So that, for instance, in 1266 a pig was burned at the stake at Fontenayaux-Roses, near Paris, for having devoured a...
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THE HARTFORD COURANT
Strong Statements Underlie Visual Vividness Of Walton Ford
As one writer fittingly described it, "The entry level to a Walton Ford painting is dazzling draftsmanship and sheer knock-out visual pleasure." Exquisite colors and intricate detail animate graceful, larger-than-life forms of birds and exotic...
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ORION
First Encounters
Before it does anything, a Walton Ford painting dazzles the eye. Vivid as nature, exquisitely rendered, the artist's wall-sized watercolors of exotic animals seduce with drop-dead good...
THE ARTFUL MIND
Walton Ford Artist
In 1995, Walton Ford and his work took the New York art world by storm, after a six-month stay in India. Articles appeared in Vogue, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and New York magazine, just to name a...
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ARTFORUM
Walton Ford
Walton Ford regularly offers a web of images and text exhuming whole realms of history: the history of natural science and zoology; exploration (and its attendant exploitation) and colonization; the history of images, artistic and otherwise; even the history of history. Remarkably he accomplishes this feat in watercolor, one of the more lightweight mediums in the lexicon of modern and contemporary...
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TEMA CELESTE
Walton Ford
Walton Ford's Elephant Bird (2002), one of several recent monumental watercolor and gouache paintings, shows an extinct, flightless native of Madagascar in the familiar style of nineteenth-century naturalist illustrations, such as those by John James Audubon. The bulking bird, said to have grown up to ten feet tall, is depicted in exacting detail at life scale with an intense descriptive focus on its hefty black feathered trunk, long, thick, muscular neck, and massive, swollen...
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ART:21
Walton Ford
I am doing the kind of research that legitimate natural history artists do, but I do it in a very lazy way compared to them. I don't want to ever pretend that I'm like one of those...
THE NEW YORK TIMES
Walton Ford
Although Audubon is the inspiration for Walton Ford's supersize watercolors of alarming birds and animals, the earlier naturalist would probably be dismayed by them. They are far more sinister than Audubon's creatures; there is some narrative to them, and they sometimes display parts of their anatomies that Audubon would blush to take his brush...
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THE NEW YORK SUN
Painted Birds
Walton Ford's paintings are freakish, fantastical, and exhibit superb draftmanship. In a new exhibit of Mr. Ford's recent watercolors, gallery visitors can view massive pigeon flocks, starlings, and other...
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NEW YORK MAGAZINE
Nature Boy
I always knew the gorilla had a secret. For the better part of 50 years, first with my parents, then with Cub Scouts, sixth-grade classes, and girlfriends, some of whom understood and some of whom didn't, I came to see the gorilla, frozen in mid-chest beat in his glass case at the Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the American Museum of Natural...
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ART ON PAPER
Walton Ford
Benjamin's Emblem (fig. 1) and The Tale of Johnny Nutkin (fig. 2) (2001), two multi-technique etchings with aquatint and drypoint in an edition of 50 plus 12 artist's proofs. Tale of Nutkin measures 44-1/4 x 31 in. (sheet size) and Benjamin 44-1/4 x 30-1/4 in. (sheet...
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VOGUE
Animal Magnetism
The dying camel takes up three-quarters of the watercolor, which is ten feet long and five feet high. Life-size, the beast lies on pink sand, its ungainly legs folded beneath...
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ART JUXTAPOZ
Inside the Watercolor World of Walton Ford
"In the late nineteenth century, a gentleman by the name of Eugene Schieffelin had a grand vision. He wanted New York's Central Park to be filled with all of the birds mentioned in Shakespeare's literary works. In 1890, he actually released a number of non-active species into the park, including 100 European...
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