How Walton Ford’s Large-Scale Watercolors Satirize the History of Colonialism | Art21

WALTON FORD:​​
I started out just painting these things

that looked like Audubons.

They were like fake Audubons,

but I twisted the subject matter a bit,

and got inside his head and tried to paint it

as if it was really his tortured soul,

as if his hand betrayed him and he painted

what he didn't want to expose about himself.

So I did start doing those

and it was very important to me then

to make them look like Audubons,

to make them look like they 
were a hundred years old,

to make them look like he painted them,

but that they escaped out 
of him without, you know,

almost like a picture Dorian Gray, but you know,

a natural history image.

The whole print project seemed 
like the natural fruition

of all the other stuff that I do.

Look at that.

<v Peter>Yeah, it's good.</v>

<v ->Beautious.</v>

All the folios of natural history prints

started out as watercolors that were done

in the field or done from nature,

and they ended up as prints

that were bound and sold by subscription,

and it makes sense to make them the way

that Peter and I make them.

<v ->We've been working on these 
prints for over five years,

and the idea of doing the prints in this size

was that we wanted as much as possible

to mimic the Audubon Double 
Folio Birds of America book.

And we wanted to work in 
some of those same techniques

that Audubon would've used to make those prints.

All of our prints are done 
with six or seven plates,

and separate colors on every plate

and probably much more saturated color

than Audubon would've ever used.

(gears creaking)

That's a part, I think, of 
Walton's way of picking up

what Audubon did, but also changing it

and distorting it a little bit,

kinda turning up the irony a little bit. (laughs)

<v Walton>Wow.</v>

<v ->That was good.</v>

<v ->Yeah, that's juicy!</v>

Psychedelic.

This looks cool.

The registration looks pretty good.

<v ->That's good.</v>

Yeah, that's encouraging 'cause

we're starting to get the feel of it, I think.

<v ->It's a pretty nice print, 
like generally just for.

<v Peter>That blue is really</v>

more intense, isn't it?

Yeah, it's nice.

(Peter laughing)
Dig it!

I like it.

Yeah, it's in.

When I was a kid I loved to draw.

And I was a little kind of amateur naturalist,

identifying birds and catching 
snakes and keeping weird pets.

This museum was like heaven to me.

I think that the dioramas here are works of art.

For an artist it was really great 
that those animals didn't move.

I could look at them in a way that 
you can't look at animals in the zoo

or animals on nature shows.

I could really see how they were put together.

Passenger pigeons were the most numerous bird on the planet Earth.

A single flock could have 2 billion birds in it.

There were such huge numbers of these birds

that it was frightening.

When they land in forests,

they break great trees in half.

And the crap would fall like snow the whole time.

And it was thought that they were inexhaustible,

so they were hunted like mad.

This is a series of photographs

that was taken in 1898.

I like doing these little research trips.

It’s like play-acting for me 
to pretend to be one of these

English natural history guys that 
are both heroes and villains.

There's an image in here

of a full grown male passenger pigeon

very beautifully posed, very proud bird.

I think it sort of foretells disaster.

It looks like because it's under lit,

it's already a ghost or a monster or somehow

There's some dark, dark undercurrent

to this photo that's very beautiful.

There's many insane kind of like narratives

that have to do with the passenger pigeon.

They were so numerous that

everyone who saw them was sort of blown away by them.

And I have some quotes that I ended up

putting on a painting.

Here they are.

This is one of the earliest descriptions from 1637.

"Millions of turtle doves on green bows,

"which sat pecking of the full right pleasant crepes

"that were supported by the lusty trees,

"whose fruitful load did cause the arms to bend."

The big thing I’m always looking for in my work

is a sort of attraction-repulsion,

where the stuff is beautiful 
to begin with until you notice

that some sort of horrible 
violence is about to happen

or is in the middle of happening.

The original impulse is to make a sort of like,

nasty little underground 
cartoon on a really large scale.

I had a lot of fun sort of making these vignettes.

They’re satisfying all their lusts

and all their cravings and all their crazy desires

like as they are going down,

and to me there is just some 
sort of black humor in that.

There is like these guys - the eggs are coming out

and as they are coming out they are being stolen.

And then it's fun to have them void on each other

and to have them murder each other.

The little one is falling out of the nest.

It’s a dark humor, but it 
makes me chuckle when I'm doing it.

There is this sort of Hudson River,

kind of beautiful landscape.

And then over here there's some indication

of maybe previous destruction,

branches that have broken down.

And here come the huge flocks, you know.

And this is the scary part,

the sort of weather system moving in

of these enormous flocks of birds.

When I started doing sketches for this

and I realized that the angle I was gonna paint it at,

and the sort of way I was gonna paint it,

it would almost seemed like it was just floating,

like a sort of strange dream-like,

slow-motion kind of falling.

And that dream-like quality gave me all this room

to pack it with all this narrative

that seems to happen sort of independent of the fact

that this thing is crashing down.

The painting I’m working on now is uh,

it’s a MONKEY BANQUET basically.

And it’s part of a series that has to do with

this mid-19th century 
explorer, Sir Richard Burton.

One of the stories that I was reading about him

that stuck with me was this one about

these monkeys he kept in his quarters

when he was a young British officer

and I’m gonna read a quote:

“He gathered together forty 
monkeys of various ages

and species and installed them in his house

in an attempt to compile a 
vocabulary of monkey language.

And one tiny one, very pretty, 
small and silky looking monkey

he used to call his wife.”

I painted the wife individually,

and I named it ‘The Forsaken.’

She sits in a tree and she 
looks all heartbroken and bereft

because she’s been abandoned by her lover.

“They all sat down on chairs at mealtimes

and the servants waited on them

and each had its bowl and plate with 
the food and drink proper for them.

He sat at the head of the table

and the pretty little monkey sat 
by him in a baby’s high chair.”

That’s just too good.

"He had a list of about 60 words

"before the experiment was concluded."

And to me this, this is just what I’m looking for

when I’m doing all this reading.

I do a lot of research and this 
thing has almost everything in it.

There’s an erotic kind of fascination to it.

There’s something that strikes me as humorous

in a quintessentially super-eccentric British way.

When these paintings leave my studio,

a lot of times I don't ever get to see 'em again.

I painted this picture about two years ago,

and I was happy that I still liked it

'cause a lot of times you come back to

work you did a while ago and can't bear it.

The drawing I did first is of this elephant,

this glorious elephant.

And then I divided it in 
a sort of Mondrian fashion

into all these different -

into a very, what I thought an elegant, 
abstract composition of rectangles.

And in each rectangle I decided what to do.

The idea of dividing it up 
into bits had to do with

the parable about the blind man and the elephant,

where each blind man grabs a hold 
of a different part of the elephant,

and the one that grabs the tusk says, well,

I know what an elephant is:

he’s smooth, hard, kind of like polished wood.

And then one grabs the leg 
and says, no, no, no, it’s…

an elephant is like a tree, 
it’s like a tree trunk.

And the tail, the guy says, 
well, it’s like a paintbrush.

And the guy who has the 
nose says it’s like a snake.

So I had this idea of having the 
elephant divided up into bits

that wouldn’t identify it as 
an elephant all by itself,

and have each one of those 
things framed individually.

And then have a different species 
of bird inhabit that little frame,

and do his thing within it.

And it’s like he doesn’t,

he doesn’t see any of the other elements

so he can’t put the whole picture together.

It’s too vast for one person to picture.

I wanted to make sort of the 
largest watercolors ever.

Ultimately that becomes fun all by itself.

It took about nine months to paint.

All of this makes it sound 
like I have this great kind of

intellectual reason for making these things,

but ultimately I want to paint a sexy monkey,

and I want to paint a big, huge 
you know elephant with an erection.

Why?

Why do I feel the need to make these things?

Why is it that you want to make 
them as disturbing as you can?

Or make them as violent and 
out of control as you can?

I like kind of overwrought emotion, melodrama,

very 19th-century modes of communicating.

I’m not a minimalist, I’m a maximalist.

The more you throw at it the better.

It’s a sort of a wasteland out there.

I want to do rich things,

I want to make rich dishes and put them out there.