Walton Ford by Walton Ford

Walton Ford by Walton Ford

Fantastic menagerie: The sinister majesty of Walton Ford's wildlife At first glance, Walton Ford's large-scale, highly-detailed watercolors of animals may recall the prints of 19th century illustrators>John James Audubon>and>Edward Lear, and others of the colonial era. But a closer look reveals a complex and>disturbingly anthropomorphic universe, full of symbols, sly jokes, and allusions to the 'operatic' nature of traditional natural history themes. The beasts and birds populating this contemporary artist's life-size paintings are>never mere objects, but dynamic actors in allegorical struggles: a wild turkey crushes a small parrot in its claw; a troupe of monkeys wreak havoc on a formal dinner table, an American buffalo is surrounded by bloodied white wolves. The book's title derives from>The Pancha Tantra, an ancient Indian book of animal tales considered the precursor to>Aesop's Fables.

This large-format edition includes>an in-depth exploration of Walton Ford's oeuvre, a complete biography, and excerpts from his textual inspirations: Vietnamese folktales and the letters of Benjamin Franklin, the>Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and Audubon's>Ornithological Biography.

First published in TASCHEN's limited collector's edition -- now available in this standard hardcover edition> Text in English, French, and German

Walton Ford grew up in Westchester County, New York, in a family of gifted storytellers. As a child he was an amateur naturalist - collecting animals, hiking, fishing, and devoting much of his free time to examining and drawing the dioramas and specimens at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He completed his studies in filmmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1982, but soon adapted his talent for storytelling to painting. His life-size watercolors, which at first glance appear to be in the vein of 19th-century natural-history painters like John J. Audubon or Edward Lear, are actually complexly layered fantasies depicting wild animals in unnatural settings and situations, and cite textual sources ranging from the letters of Benjamin Franklin to the journals of Leonardo da Vinci. Ford lived in New York City for most of the 1980s and '90s - home base for personally and professional influential travels to countries including Italy, India, and Mexico - and for some years supported himself as a wood refinisher, carpenter, metalworker, and illustrator, while developing his craft and audience. His work has been exhibited widely since 1987 at private galleries and public institutions including The Whitney Museum, The Brooklyn Museum, the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, Michael Cohn Gallery in Los Angeles. He has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. He now lives, works, and hikes in the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts. Bill Buford was the fiction editor of the New Yorker for eight years, where he first came upon Walton Ford's work to illustrate some of the stories he published. He is now a New Yorker staff writer. He was also the founding editor of Granta and has written two books, Among the Thugs and Heat: An Amateur's Adventures as a Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany. He lives in New York City with his wife Jessica Green, and their two sons.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9783822852378
ISBN 10	3822852376
Title	Walton Ford
Author	Walton Ford
Condition	Unavailable
Publisher	Taschen GmbH
Year published	2009-07-25
Number of pages	306
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable