Walton Ford at Paul Kasmin Gallery
An exhibition of recent watercolor’s by Art21 artist Walton Ford (Season 2) opens tomorrow at Paul Kasmin Gallery. This is the artist’s first exhibition at the gallery since his traveling retrospective, Tigers Of Wrath, and the publication of Pancha Tantra, a comprehensive monograph of his work. The exhibition closes on July 3, 2008.
An excerpt from the press release:
“Ford is especially interested in the perceptions of animals by humans as evidenced by documentation. After researching specific stories, Ford offers his interpretation—sometimes exaggerating the animal’s supposed humanness and in other instances, stripping the animal of imposed metaphors, and thereby restoring the candor of the animal’s bestial state. The anthropomorphic nature of Ford’s animals is often compared to the work of artist, John J. Audubon, one of Ford’s many influences.”
The Taschen Books website features a short video of Ford in his Berkshires studio in December 2007.
Walton Ford’s home video
Check out this short video, shot by Season 2 artist Walton Ford himself in his Berkshire studio, in conjunction with the release of his book Pancha Tantra by Taschen.
Pancha Tantra: Walton’s World
Taschen, the German publisher specializing in art, design, and architecture, has released a new monographic masterpiece on Walton Ford, an artist featured in Season 2 who creates naturalistic and consistently surprising animal illustrations. Entitled Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra, this book is the first in-depth exploration of Ford’s body of work. It includes 12 horizontal and 4 vertical foldouts, along with dozen of details, Ford’s bio, an appendix with substantial excerpts from textual sources for Ford’s paintings, and an introduction by Bill Buford, writer and former fiction editor of the New Yorker (he is still a staff writer), where he often used Ford’s work to illustrate his stories. Pancha Tantra is hand-crafted and limited to a 1,600-copy limited edition signed by the artist.
In addition, for the exclusive Art edition, limited to the first 100 copies, Ford worked with master printer Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, New Hampshire, using the traditional techniques of line etching, aquatint, drypoint, and spite-bite aquatint to make Limed Blossoms, an original six-color intaglio print.
As the Spanish magazine El Pais Semanal points out, Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra is not just a luxury book, but a discovery of the artist himself, as is work is less familiar in Europe.
For more information about Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra and prices, visit Taschen’s website.
Don’t Miss Walton Ford’s Tigers of Wrath
Tigers of Wrath, the exhibition of Season 2 artist Walton Ford’s large-scale works on paper organized by the Brooklyn Museum, is currently on view at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, FL.
The show presents around fifty of Ford‚Äôs images of birds and animals. These are meticulously executed in a style resembling John James Audubon’s Birds of America, but one that also contains veins of political and social discourse. By using the non-human world as a mirror for our own, Ford employs his skill as an artist and observer of people to communicate his subjective commentary on contemporary society.
Art21’s video profile of Ford is also featured in the exhibition and loops throughout the day on a flat-panel screen at the end of the show.
In other news, Ford was recently featured on the PBS series American Masters in the episode John James Audubon: Drawn from Nature on July 25, demonstrating how Audobon posed birds in order to render them in extremely realistic and highly detailed plates. You can watch this clip of Ford, currently playing on the American Masters Web site.
Tigers of Wrath is on view until September 2.
Read more about the original Brooklyn Museum exhibition here.
Learn more about John James Audubon on the American Masters site here.
