A horde of monkeys celebrates a big feast, a panther roams through a snow-covered Alpine landscape, a pack of white wolves surrounds a blood-dripping buffalo in a French garden. At first glance, Walton Ford's large-format animal watercolors are reminiscent of prints by French and British illustrators of the 19th century colonial period. However, a second look reveals a pictorial universe of complex and disturbing allusions. Tigers, lions, birds and monkeys that populate the life-size images appear as fast-paced actors in allegorical battles. This is how Walton Ford's brilliant “Bestiary” is created by mixing historical facts, natural history research and fantasies that wander into the surreal.
Walton Ford, who was born in Larchmont, New York, in 1960 and now lives in the mountains of the Berkshires in Massachusetts, was fascinated by the exhibits of the New York Museum of Natural History from an early age. He dealt particularly intensively with the works of the American ornithologist and animal illustrator John James Audubon (1785–1851). Since the 1990s, in search of analogies between yesterday and today, Walton Ford has been creating images in which detailed representations of natural history are superimposed with current views and critical comments and quoting text sources from past centuries in old master writing. With his works, which read like satires on political oppression and the exploitation of the environment, he questions the dictum of “always new” and “always better” that has prevailed since the Renaissance. At the same time, he puts established expectations regarding the rules of contemporary aesthetics up for discussion. His colorful pictures open our eyes to a reality that we have repressed or forgotten. A contemporary “bestiary” of haunting imaginative power unfolds before our eyes.