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.