We Want More: An Interview with Walton Ford

Daniel Menges

When you first see a Walton Ford painting—and I don’t mean glancing, like one glances at an advertisement—after you really see a Walton Ford painting you are never the same. You’ll never look at animals—or people, the same way. The animals stare at you while you sleep in your silk sheets.

Walton Ford, Nila, 1999-2000, watercolor, gouache, ink, and pencil on paper, 144 x 216 inches

Painted in the style of famous naturalist/hunter/artist John Audubon, Walton’s animals act out history’s endless cycle of birth, play, desire, pleasure, pain and death. As animals (or surrogate humans), they are bound by curiosities and passions that will only entrap them in the end. They hunt each other only to be killed by an unseen enemy. Borrowing from such 18th and 19th Century naturalists as Edward Lear and T.J. Grandville, Walton paints in watercolor, gouache, ink and pencil, labeling his animals with both their given and Latin names. He suffuses multiple languages of meaning into the primordial fight and flight of his animals by adding mythology, pop culture, spiritual scripture, science and history. Often painted in life-size, Walton’s animals cross between real life and artifact, symbolism and anthropology, psychology and history.

Walton’s work has been featured in many quality periodicals, including The New York Times, Vogue, New York Magazine, Orion, Artforum, Italian Elle as well as Art in America. He has had many solo and group exhibitions across the United States, Europe and Asia. This includes the Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery in New York, the Ho Gallery in Hong Kong, the John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Maine. Walton was featured this fall on PBS’s documentary series, art: 21: Art in the Twenty-First Century.

Walton’s animals have a glint in their eye that suggests everything but confirms nothing. They know more than you do. Caught in the moment of death, entrapment, desire and ignorant freedom, his animals are as human as we are when we are honest to ourselves. Their wisdom and secret laugh is also tinged with bitter suffering.

Not surprisingly, the forcefulness, passion, intelligence, humor, understanding and drive that inhabit his work also appears in Walton himself. While he looks like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, he is an unexpectedly personable guy. Walton’s good friend Will Wendt, who also has work at the Paul Kasmin Gallery, describe Walton as "extreme" and "self-possessed." Besides being a great storyteller, he also has great taste in music including David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and The Velvet Underground.

This interview took place on the afternoon of October 21, 2003 at Walton Ford ‘s studio in Great Barrington, MA:

Daniel Menges: Did your decision to paint animals come from your childhood fascination with the Natural History Museum, John Audubon, and others like him?

Walton Ford: Yeah, that’s definitely right. When I was a little kid there was a culture in the family of amateur naturalist kind of stuff. It was the sportsman/naturalist kind of combo. It was definitely more Sports Afield than National Audubon or Sierra Club. Later, I got interested in the trappings of that, like Audubon prints and duck hunting paintings. Then taking those loads of communication and fucking around with it in a way that would make them new, or give them a spin that didn’t exist before.

DM: "That spin" is what caught me.

WF: I want the images to first appear rather conservative and related to Natural History Art, like artifacts from the 19th Century. Second, they assert some sort of rebellion against that. They do both things at once. All the beauty that I’ve always admired in that early 18th and 19th Century Art is what drove me to want to make these things, but when you add this other level—that’s when it gets interesting. That gives me a reason to make good art. Otherwise, you got something that’s just like a duck stamp.

DM: From what I’ve heard, Audubon seems to have been a hypocrite.

WF: I’m not interested in his personal hypocrisy, because I don’t think that’s the big issue. He was a hunter and a sportsman, as any naturalist would have been. He was a little more over-the-top and a little crazier than most. He shot a lot more than he had to. He wasn’t that different than his peers. What’s interesting about him to me is that we receive our ideas about how to interact with the natural world from guys like that. Our history has to do with that view of the natural world—construction of the world by guys like Audubon. It’s no mystery they’re the fathers of our conservation.

DM: As in, Christopher Columbus?

WF: —Your heroes—

DM: —Exploiting the Indians and building some new western civilization?

WF: —Yeah, right—Cortez or any of these guys. The conquest and the discovery go on at the same moment. The entire scientific discovery happens at the same moment as the destruction of the thing that is being studied. We’re going to completely destroy the Brazilian Rainforest. There’s no way around it, right? At the same time, the same western powers that are destroying are going to send their scientists down. It’s a race against time to discover as many possible species (like the Okapi, a really cool giraffe-like creature that no one has seen before), set up little national parks—it’s all part of the conquest. I’m interested in Audubon as this proto-American figure.

We Want More: An Interview with Walton Ford – Daniel Menges

We Want More: An Interview with Walton Ford