Walton Ford
Born 1960, White Plains, NY, lives in Southfield, MA and works in Great Barrington, MA
Dying Words, 2005, 6 copper plates, hardground etching, aquatint, spit bite aquatint, drypoint, scraping and burnishing on white Rives paper, ed. of 75, 14” x 18”, Courtesy Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York
History is never innocent in the world of Walton Ford’s wildlife watercolors and prints. Executed in the same precise manner of the nineteenth-century naturalist illustrator, James John Audubon, Ford’s animals are frozen in devilish acts that range from violent to simply mean-spirited, and sometimes, in parodies of famous paintings. The fantastical combination of a historical style with comic or disturbing content makes these works pointed political commentaries about international policies, the environment, and human nature.
Within Ford’s lexicon of what he gladly terms “fake natural history” animal species become allegories for nations, and his antiquated style is a shorthand critique of political and social issues rooted in the past, most explicitly the colonization of Africa and India by western Europe. By using animals for sociopolitical critique and commentary, Ford consciously follows in the footsteps of fifteenth-century artists like Hieronymus Bosch and Albrecht Dürer.
As example, Dying Words reenacts Benjamin West’s eighteenth-century masterpiece, Death of General Wolfe. Though a history painting, West’s work is famous for the romantic haze and heroic narrative that distorts a rather gory military death. In part homage, part satire, Ford places a flock of Carolina Parakeets in place of the soldiers, further emphasizing the flattery and thinly-veiled agendas of historical memory.
