Thursday, December 15, 2011

Walton Ford


Walton Ford is painter, as well as a talented storyteller.  He adapted his love for storytelling to his paintings, as well as took inspiration from many different artists.  Walton Ford was inspired from the work of nineteenth-century artist, naturalist and watercolorist John James Audubon.  He was influenced by J.J. Grandville and Sir John Tennial, who were both French artists whose caricatures of part-human, part-animal subjects satirized nineteenth-century French and British Society. 

Ford’s meticulous paintings satirize the history of colonialism and the continuing impact of slavery on today’s social and environmental landscape.  For also used many other forms of political oppression in today’s social environment to help create his work, as well as his ability for storytelling to create unique and massive pieces of art.  His works are extremely detailed, seeing as he was a very meticulous person.  Each painting is a tutorial in the scenes of his stories depicting the wrongs committed by nineteenth-century industrialists.  Each of Ford’s animal portraits doubles as a complex, symbolic system, which the artist layers with clues, jokes, and lessons in colonial literature and folktales.

Ford’s works are amusing in the sense that they depict scenes in such detail that they could be real, but from what is being depicted the viewer knows they are not real, but just a story.  His paintings are vivid with color and life, showing us as the viewers the stories he is telling us as if we were actually in them.  When an artist can give someone the emotion of reality, but knowing the stories are not real, it is a great and renowned thing.  As artists, we tell many different stories in our own work.  Ford being able to depict his stories or images brightly, colorfully, and realistically is a great feature of his own work and what makes him a fine artist.       







No comments:

Post a Comment