The Householder

"Walton Ford is one of the most unmodern of modern painters--a premodernist, trying to reconnect us to a rustic, rough land that had many more animals in it, and many more animals known by the people nearby, than the barren cities and suburbs where most of us now live. Audubon, and others, may have found a home in a place like this, but didn't understand it, or see it, with Ford's compelling starkness. It is evident in the most elementary-seeming details. Like Audubon, Ford paints birds; birds have beaks; like Audubon, Ford paints beaks. But no one has painted beaks with such violent relish. Conventionally, the beak defines a bird's ability to find food. The way a finch's beak changes, from island to island in the Galapagos, according to the environment and what is available to eat, is at the heart of Darwin's theories of natural selection. In Ford's hands, a beak becomes a Darwinian nightmare" (B. Buford, "Field Studies, Walton Ford's Bestiary," Walton Ford, Pancha Tantra, Cologne, 2003, p. 11).