English
Bruegel by way of Borges
Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra. Excerpt from the introduction by Bill Buford
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Then there is the physical texture. Like Ford's other works, Nila is a watercolor, painted on paper, not canvas, an unsettling evanescence, which, in me, at least, gave rise to a feeling that I could tear the picture off the wall, crumple it up into a giant ball, and throw it away. Ford's watercolors ask you to see them as field notes, an anachronistic conceit, like hastily done dispatches or reports, a bearing witness (again, that explorer's imperative) of some rare creature suddenly sighted. I kept staring hard at what Ford works with: so portable but so perishable. All painters have had to find their relationship to photography. Ford discovered his by projecting himself into a world that didn't yet have a camera.
And then there is the bibliographic urgency. You can't ignore that the paintings want you to think of them in the context of a specific history, almost as if they were not paintings, but documents or literary works. (Nila, in this regard, is exceptional because it has so little commentary: Many have an actual script written round the margins, often half-rubbed-out, a diary entry, or a favorite passage from a book, something essential to the initial composition, possibly scrawled there to help keep the artist focused.) Almost all of these paintings owe their conception to a piece of text. The journals of Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century British explorer who became convinced that he could speak to monkeys in their own language, inspire The Sensorium. The louche history of the Earl of Rochester, the infamous seventeenth-century wastrel and rogue, informs The Debt to Pleasure. A nineteenth-century guide to bird trapping, the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (which includes the burning of a salamander—the magical creature meant to survive fire—in the family hearth), the sixteenth-century diary of a Dutch explorer (the entry describing a polar bear's killing two crew members), a letter by the degenerate English Consul in Naples (about a pet monkey that enjoys enemas): Ford, I find myself thinking fancifully, must be one of the first artists since the invention of the paintbrush to find his images not from the world, in all its color and clutter and shapes, but from books. I exaggerate but the exaggeration seems to describe the uniqueness of the non-visual way this highly visualizing mind seems to work.While the paintings themselves—flamboyantly detailed, extravagantly precise—might invite the obvious comparisons to the wildlife work of John James Audubon, the texts they are based on (I imagine Ford's discovering them in cracked leather bindings or on a shelf in a dark library of a neglected country estate, the walls mounted with hunting trophies) reveal something else at work, a writerly imagination: Bruegel by way of Borges. Of course, a Ford elephant painting would suggest an essay by Orwell—a literary imagination invokes literary associations—even though the essay itself probably didn't inspire the painting. That inspiration, typically, was found in a much more obscure text, an ancient elephant-training manual, translated from the Sanskrit in 1985, that includes an explanation of the origins of must, which, according to the anonymous author, was invented at the beginning of the world and distributed among all of Brahma's creations, half of it going to every living thing on the planet, except the elephant, which then got all of the rest. And that's what you see in Nila—a unique animal madness, the energy of a wild, frightening, unfocused arousal, there, a fury of excess, quickly, before it goes...
Page [1] [2]
Page [1] [2]
Then there is the physical texture. Like Ford's other works, Nila is a watercolor, painted on paper, not canvas, an unsettling evanescence, which, in me, at least, gave rise to a feeling that I could tear the picture off the wall, crumple it up into a giant ball, and throw it away. Ford's watercolors ask you to see them as field notes, an anachronistic conceit, like hastily done dispatches or reports, a bearing witness (again, that explorer's imperative) of some rare creature suddenly sighted. I kept staring hard at what Ford works with: so portable but so perishable. All painters have had to find their relationship to photography. Ford discovered his by projecting himself into a world that didn't yet have a camera.
And then there is the bibliographic urgency. You can't ignore that the paintings want you to think of them in the context of a specific history, almost as if they were not paintings, but documents or literary works. (Nila, in this regard, is exceptional because it has so little commentary: Many have an actual script written round the margins, often half-rubbed-out, a diary entry, or a favorite passage from a book, something essential to the initial composition, possibly scrawled there to help keep the artist focused.) Almost all of these paintings owe their conception to a piece of text. The journals of Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century British explorer who became convinced that he could speak to monkeys in their own language, inspire The Sensorium. The louche history of the Earl of Rochester, the infamous seventeenth-century wastrel and rogue, informs The Debt to Pleasure. A nineteenth-century guide to bird trapping, the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini (which includes the burning of a salamander—the magical creature meant to survive fire—in the family hearth), the sixteenth-century diary of a Dutch explorer (the entry describing a polar bear's killing two crew members), a letter by the degenerate English Consul in Naples (about a pet monkey that enjoys enemas): Ford, I find myself thinking fancifully, must be one of the first artists since the invention of the paintbrush to find his images not from the world, in all its color and clutter and shapes, but from books. I exaggerate but the exaggeration seems to describe the uniqueness of the non-visual way this highly visualizing mind seems to work.While the paintings themselves—flamboyantly detailed, extravagantly precise—might invite the obvious comparisons to the wildlife work of John James Audubon, the texts they are based on (I imagine Ford's discovering them in cracked leather bindings or on a shelf in a dark library of a neglected country estate, the walls mounted with hunting trophies) reveal something else at work, a writerly imagination: Bruegel by way of Borges. Of course, a Ford elephant painting would suggest an essay by Orwell—a literary imagination invokes literary associations—even though the essay itself probably didn't inspire the painting. That inspiration, typically, was found in a much more obscure text, an ancient elephant-training manual, translated from the Sanskrit in 1985, that includes an explanation of the origins of must, which, according to the anonymous author, was invented at the beginning of the world and distributed among all of Brahma's creations, half of it going to every living thing on the planet, except the elephant, which then got all of the rest. And that's what you see in Nila—a unique animal madness, the energy of a wild, frightening, unfocused arousal, there, a fury of excess, quickly, before it goes...
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Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra
Hardcover + Box 14.8 x 19.7 in., 354 pages
$ 1800.00
$ 1800.00
Walton Ford's meticulous depictions of wild and mysterious animals. Limited to 1,500 individually numbered copies, each signed by Walton Ford
The Forsaken, 1999
Nila, 2000