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| Walton Ford, Rhyndacus, 2014, watercolor, gouache and ink on paper, 119 1/4 x 60 1/4 inches |
A Walton Ford painting can be like your favorite Wes Anderson film. Both are predicated on stylized nostalgia. Both are set in fantastical worlds that are at once wholly fabricated and yet entirely familiar. And both are also punctuated with the rare, shocking moment—usually in the form of violence or vulgarity—that can alternatively snap the viewer back to reality or take us further down the rabbit hole.
writing about The Tigress
At a full five-by-ten feet, it depicts a medieval anecdote about a fleeing poacher who distracts a mother tiger robbed of her cub by dropping reflective glass orbs in his wake. In Ford’s watercolor, those balls surround the poor animal like ominous bubbles, theatrically conveying her sense of hopeless frustration.
According to the gallery, Ford draws upon his ongoing natural history research, mining literary sources, folklore and historical anecdotes for inspiration and imagery. The painting Rhyndacus (2014) is derived from an account in Aelian’s De Natura Animalium. This ancient Roman miscellany of the natural world briefly mentions an impossibly large, sixty-foot serpent inhabiting Phrygia (present day Turkey) that was said to magically lure prey into its open maw. Read More
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Walton Ford, The Tigress, 2013, watercolor and gouache on paper, 60 x 120 inches
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| Walton Ford, Bosse-de-Nage 1898 - "HA HA!", 2014, watercolor, gouache and ink on paper, 59 3/4 x 41 1/2 inches |
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