King Kong: Skull Island, Disney’s The Jungle book and
Zootopia are all recent movie releases that I’m certain Walton Ford loves. Ford
the accomplished contemporary artist; has a MFA in filmmaking and creates works
as a fine artist that feature and reflect the creatures of nature and the
natural world as his primary subjects. There is no possibility that he could
not have loved these fore-mentioned films each possessing an uncanny
resemblance and affinity of a definitive purpose and respect of commonality. Ford’s
art could have been the basis of each films pre-production design and
story-boards. Ford’s extraordinary depth and rang is unpatralled in his times
for their achievement in the advancement of a form that has been largely
ignored for decades. His lush, detailed, richly colored, exuberant pieces adorn
many museums around the country and homes of the uber-rich. 
At first look Ford is a naturalist artist in the grand
tradition of the likes of John J Audubon. He has painstakingly studied;
primarily at the Rhode Island School of Design, New York’s Museum of Natural
History and most importantly from “Mother Nature” herself. He parts from the
traditionalist in his treatments of his subjects and places them often in very
unnatural situations. He adorns his pieces with unusual texts; sometimes
written in Latin that many times over are comedic, ironic and timely.
The scale of Walton Ford’s art is also worthy of note. I
have been fortunate enough to have seen his water-color representation of an
Aurochs Bull on several occasions at Washington, DC’s American Art Museum. The dimensions
of the work are 95” x 132.” It is divided into three sections and having first
seen the work scaled down in the pages of “Art in America” magazine it remains
a shockingly interesting as well as astonishingly beautiful experience to see
this much larger than life master piece!
Ford remains ever and increasingly engaged in his work. He
has recently done portraits of Kong, a commissioned Rolling Stones’ album cover
and now depicts human beings in his paintings (usually as background
embellishments.) Walton Ford thrives in his own “Zootopian World” as we benefit
from his skill, devotion and Herculean extravagance of forms.
