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Lot Essay
Impelled by the pioneering expeditions of Charles Darwin, Walton Ford converts the elementary-seeming detail and the anthropomorphic tendencies of the 18th and 19th century naturalists into allegorical compositions that question the human relationship with the animal kingdom. Flamboyantly detailed and extravagantly precise, Necropolis’s obtrusive physical scale mirrors the actual size of the animals it depicts, as though Ford aspires to capture the immediacy of the beasts before they return into the wildness. The title of the painting, Necropolis, meaning the “city of death” in ancient Greek, evokes a sense of the tragedy which literally addresses the subject matter of the painting: the central figure of a gigantic camel languishes under the beaks—if not the trumpets of pain—of the birds in much more modest size. The camel yearns towards the forever desolate sky, a life of great vitality and complexity personifying the waste and the suffering, while the birds immerse in the squandered joy: a life terminates, others survive.
Fully animated and staged within dramatic, vivid narratives, Ford’s canvas is essentially a parable about humanity and its persecution of the natural world. As Walton Ford explained, “my work reacts to the history of natural history and the history of people's interactions with animals and other cultures and things like that. And our way of remembering natural history events and creatures that are now extinct" (W. Ford, quoted in W. Hanley, “Walton Ford,” Blouin ArtInfo, November 2007). Unlike the camels in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s early Orientalist paintings which are usually static and drawn to convey as much peace and tranquility as possible, the camel in Necropolis is an elephantine meal that the birds feast on, almost a metaphor of men hunting the unchallengeable with vigor, excited by the seemingly endless bounty. Ford is smart in choosing the medium of his work: the unsettling evanescence of the watercolor juxtaposes the violent representation, conveying a message that life is so vital yet so perishable. As Bill Bufford remarked, “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” (B. Buford, “Field Studies, Walton Ford’s Bestiary,” Walton Ford, Pancha Tantra, Cologne, 2007, p. 11). In intoxicating detail, Necropolis invokes a ferocious appetite both in the subject it represents and the reality to which it alludes.
Fully animated and staged within dramatic, vivid narratives, Ford’s canvas is essentially a parable about humanity and its persecution of the natural world. As Walton Ford explained, “my work reacts to the history of natural history and the history of people's interactions with animals and other cultures and things like that. And our way of remembering natural history events and creatures that are now extinct" (W. Ford, quoted in W. Hanley, “Walton Ford,” Blouin ArtInfo, November 2007). Unlike the camels in Jean-Léon Gérôme’s early Orientalist paintings which are usually static and drawn to convey as much peace and tranquility as possible, the camel in Necropolis is an elephantine meal that the birds feast on, almost a metaphor of men hunting the unchallengeable with vigor, excited by the seemingly endless bounty. Ford is smart in choosing the medium of his work: the unsettling evanescence of the watercolor juxtaposes the violent representation, conveying a message that life is so vital yet so perishable. As Bill Bufford remarked, “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” (B. Buford, “Field Studies, Walton Ford’s Bestiary,” Walton Ford, Pancha Tantra, Cologne, 2007, p. 11). In intoxicating detail, Necropolis invokes a ferocious appetite both in the subject it represents and the reality to which it alludes.