[Untitled]

1989

Walton Ford draws his inspiration from the work of such artists as the fifteenth- to sixteenth-century fantasy painter Hieronymus Bosch, the nineteenth-century naturalist John James Audubon, and the nineteenth-century French caricaturist J. J. Grandville, whose parthuman, part-animal subjects satirize man’s shortcomings. Although very different from Ford’s more recent watercolors, these four early oil paintings, a series of family portraits where the image is complicated and turned grotesque by the juxtaposition of repulsive elements close to the sitter’s face, hint at the artist’s continuing interest in the association of man and animal. Ford often explores this interest in relation to the history of colonialism, nineteenth-century industrialism, or contemporary politics.