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The New Contemporary Art Magazine
New York based painter Walton Ford, featured here on our blog, is well known for his monumental watercolors of animals. From his tongue-in-cheek depictions of King Kong, to mythical 60 foot serpents, and epic battles between beasts, his works take the visual aesthetic of traditional natural history painting and apply it to an often bizarre and fantastical narrative. Ford recently debuted six new paintings at Paul Kasmin's booth at Frieze New York, an homage to the incredible journey of a black panther.
Walton Ford's work is immediately impactful because of its scale, especially considering the artist works with watercolor — a notoriously unforgiving medium. Some of his monumental paintings span almost 10 feet wide. Small pieces for Ford are about as wide as the average human is tall. His current show "Watercolors" at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York City is an allegorical series of animal paintings with a storybook appeal. Often tongue-in-cheek, the paintings are nostalgically presented as artifacts from the 19th and early 20th centuries with hand-written notes presumably left by the animal subjects for posterity.