Walton Ford

Walton Ford’s expansive watercolor paintings appropriate the informative detail and narrative scope of traditional natural history art only to subvert its conventions. Ford draws on his extensive research into disparate visual and written sources, including naturalists’ illustrations and dioramas, scientific field studies, explorers’ accounts, and zookeepers’ manuals, as well as fables and mythology, historical art, and Hollywood movies. Imaginatively interpreting events rooted in these materials, he frequently inscribes the paintings with marginal texts that provide additional glosses of meaning. Representing touchpoints of cultural and natural history, he alludes to colonialism, extinction, and the ecological consequences of the Anthropocene epoch, tempering his works’ violence, tragedy, and eulogies for the natural world with moments of wit and satire. Ford was born in 1960 and grew up in the Hudson Valley, New York. Today, he lives and works in New York City. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, graduating in 1982. In the early 1990s, Ford began incorporating the imagery of natural history illustration into his work. This approach was catalyzed in 1994 when he spent several months in India and began painting indigenous birds while thinking about the impact of global colonialism, leading him to a sustained reflection on wildlife and historical allegory that would form the core of his project. In 2006, Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford was presented at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and traveled to the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Florida (2007), and the San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas (2007–08). This midcareer survey featured over fifty vast, meticulously detailed watercolors that drew from sources including accounts by historical figures such as naturalist John James Audubon and explorer Richard Burton. In 2007, Taschen published Pancha Tantra , a large-scale book titled after an ancient Indian collection of animal fables, which offers a comprehensive overview of Ford’s career. In 2010, Bestiarium , Ford’s first institutional exhibition in Europe, was presented at Hamburger Bahnhof–Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, and traveled to Albertina, Vienna, and Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark (2010–11). It was followed by an exhibition at Paris’s Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature (2015–16), which presented work from across his oeuvre along with a series inspired by the Beast of Gévaudan, a mysterious wolflike creature reportedly responsible for savagely attacking villagers in eighteenth-century France, in an installation integrated with the museum’s collection of historic art and taxidermy. In 2017, Gagosian, Beverly Hills, presented Calafia , an exhibition of panoramic paintings inspired by the myths, legends, and folklore of California and featuring grizzly bears, griffins, the MGM lion, and prehistoric creatures emerging from the La Brea Tar Pits. In 2022, Gagosian held an exhibition of Ford’s monumental watercolors in New York based on subjects including the journey of Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca, the killing of one of the last great auks, and the trapping of a golden eagle that was then portrayed by Audubon. Representing wild animals as visions and symbols, these works grapple with distortions of truth perpetuated through historical sources.