Walton Ford: Birds and Beasts of the Studio at The Morgan Library and Museum

Walton Ford (b. 1960), Study 2 for “Leipzig,” 2018, Watercolor, gouache, and ink over graphite, The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of the artist, 2019.230. © 2024 Walton Ford. Photography by Janny Chiu.

The Morgan Library and Museum|
New York, New York
April 12, 2024  - October 20, 2024
 

By DAVID AMBROSE July 15, 2024

“They were not half living or quarter living. They were simply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly. When a halt was made, they dropped down in traces like dead dogs and the spark dimmed and paled and seemed to go out.”

- Jack London, The Call of the Wild

Torn and frayed, ripped, deckled, and stamped, the exhibition Walton Ford: Birds and Beasts of the Studio celebrates a gift by the artist of sixty-three small-scale working drawings, sketches and studies to the Morgan Library and Museum. The drawings track the spark of a very different kind; the initial spark of Ford’s creative process leading from flint strip to, in some cases, a literal bonefyre. The exhibit features a collection of diaristic works on paper which unlock the doors to his studio practice and working process along with three finished works on loan that relate directly to a handful of the studies. It proves to be a tour de force of craftsmanship from an artist who clearly respects the word. Buttressing the exhibition is a cache of animal drawings selected by Ford from the Morgan’s vast holdings offering a history lesson of animals in art while also giving a glimpse into his personal taste and inspiration. The exhibition was organized by Isabelle Dervaux, former Acquavella Curator and Department Head of Modern and Contemporary Drawings, and Jennifer Tonkovich, Eugene and Clare Thaw Curator of Prints and Drawings.

Walton Ford (b. 1960), Study for “La Reata,” ca. 2010, Graphite on sketchbook page, The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of, the artist, 2019.228. © 2024 Walton Ford. Photography by Janny Chiu.

Each of the sixty-three drawings in this card catalog of an exhibition seems to slip into a different subcategory; cold-blooded clinical studies made on research trips to natural history museums; warm-blooded rapid gesture drawings in search of a composition or narrative thread; pulsating graphite studies in agitated pencil lines and shading to mark a specific time of day or the posture of the subject; atmospheric watercolor tone poems that grapple with pictorial space or mood; and lastly a group of “eureka” drawings meant to firm up a final composition or perhaps, document a work about to leave the studio on a more personal level than a photograph might.

Taken individually, many of the drawings barely muster a second look, but when bundled together, this “bag of bones” becomes the document of a living, breathing, creative organism; Ford’s private working process. They prove to be incredibly instructive, revealing both the restless spontaneity of Ford’s imagination and the hidden layers of alienated labor which go on behind the scenes during the construction of his grand cinematic masterworks. No fewer than five studies of Augury (2018), a watercolor, and four light and shadow studies made on brown paper, allow one to watch Ford think across the paper’s surface with incremental precision. In each, secondary actors, a pair of Bengal tigers, lurk in the shadows about to pounce on the unsuspecting lion illustrating a legend from the Royal Menagerie at the Tower of London - symbolizing the impending fall of the British Empire.
 

Walton Ford (b. 1960), Study 2 for “Augury,” 2018, Graphite and colored pencil on light brown paper, The Morgan Library & Museum, gift of the artist, 2019.199. © 2024 Walton Ford. Photography by Janny Chiu
 

Ford’s greatest artifice may be his ability to harness our imagination to complete his work. In Chicago Field Museum Gorilla Study (ca. 2015), the artist uses a visual shorthand of highlights and shadow in colored pencil on beige-toned paper to convince the viewer that twenty drawn hairs look and feel like twenty thousand as the fur cascades down the gorilla’s face like water traveling around rocks in a stream. In Study 2 for Leipzig (2013), a misty Turneresque watercolor study, rain, steam, and speed now lead to a trolley car accident releasing a group of lions onto the moist, cobblestone streets of Leipzig at night. A toppled bowler hat both attracts and confuses a lioness while punctuating the scene like a doorstop.

The small studies offer a stark contrast to Ford’s monumental animal paintings which seem as if they have been torn from the pages of the romance novels of nature; National Geographic meets the National Enquirer. These grand, highly detailed, finished works are initially derived from the written word; historical documents, eyewitness accounts, and folktales. Ford then processes the stories; capturing and caging their protagonists in his imagination; embarking on a series of paintings that will eventually exhaust them thematically.

Walton Ford (b. 1960), Ars Gratia Artis, 2017, Watercolor, gouache, and ink, Private Collection. © 2024 Walton Ford. Photography by Christopher Burke.
 

The earliest of his large-scale watercolors were inspired by the American naturalist, John James Audubon’s, “Birds of North America” and “The Quadrupeds of North America,” of which there is  a splendid watercolor example of an Eastern Gray Squirrel (1841) included by Ford from the Morgan collection. While Audubon would use the actual legend of his illustrations to offer a physical description of the bird or mammal, Ford would caption and enhance his early paintings with parts of a legend handwritten in an elegant personal cursive longhand which would hang in the corners or along the bottom border like the cobwebs of history. The animals or birds were then served up on fields of antique whites tempered with tongue-in-cheek trompe l’oeil effects such as acidic brown paper edges and foxing blemishes. Oddly, the cursive writing also creates an atmosphere of indentured servitude, as if one has unfolded a seventeenth century contract binding the animals and birds to a narrative they may or may not have actively participated in based largely on secondhand reports and hearsay.

Walton Ford (b. 1960), Die Ziege, 2016, Watercolor, gouache, and ink, Private Collection. © 2024 Walton Ford. Photography by Christopher Bur
 

Ford’s more recent works have grown in scale from monumental to near cinematic as he has shifted the point of view from viewer to the subject. The black humor and irony which Ford’s work became famous for now appears clouded in pathos. In Ars Gratia Artis (2017), Hollywood quite literally enters the fray in a letterbox shaped painting of a retired Metro Goldwyn Mayer lion. The exhausted and inebriated Barbary lion, a now extinct subspecies, has glazed over eyes and collapses poolside in the evening. The lion is bathed in an eerie jaundiced light as if it is frozen in amber. While in Die Ziege (2016), an escaped black panther from the Zurich Zoo has dragged a freshly killed goat up a tree on a snowy night in Switzerland in search of a few moments of solitude. The black panther balances on the tree branch out of sight of a lone torch-bearing farmer who pursues it. One senses in both cases these once proud animals would much rather head for hills, be it the Hollywood Hills or the Swiss Alps, than deal with the planet’s prickliest inhabitants, man.

Legend has it that the farmer would eventually kill, butcher, cook, and eat that black panther. The panther makes a final ghostly appearance in two watercolor studies from 2018, Flucht and Verfolgen, raised aloft on a plume of smoke from a bonefyre. Perhaps only then having found an escape from the ever-present problem of mankind. WM