Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Walton Ford










I've really loved Walton Ford's work for a while. I was able to see a series of his pieces in San Francisco a couple years ago and I couldn't believe the detail. I love how successful he is as a story teller, these secret worlds of animals or the bizarre stories of the relationships that developed between scientists and their animal specimens...It's a good kind of weird.

"Walton Ford was born in 1960 in Larchmont, New York. Ford graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with the intention of becoming a filmmaker, but later adapted his talents as a storyteller to his unique style of large-scale watercolor. Blending depictions of natural history with political commentary, Ford’s meticulous paintings satirize the history of colonialism and the continuing impact of slavery and other forms of political oppression on today’s social and environmental landscape. Each painting is as much a tutorial in flora and fauna as it is as a scathing indictment of the wrongs committed by nineteenth-century industrialists or, locating the work in the present, contemporary American consumer society." -Art21