Walton Ford - California Catalogue - Hardcover

Unknown

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1938748484 ISBN 13: 9781938748486

Publisher: Gagosian Gallery

Synopsis

Ford’s work explores where natural history and human culture intersect. His large-scale, empirically precise, and highly detailed paintings consider the drama and history of animals as they exist in the human imagination, revealing the deeply intertwined relationships between nature and civilization. Using the visual language and medium of nineteenth century naturalist illustrators such as John James Audubon, Ford masters the aesthetics of scientific truth only to amplify and subvert them, creating provocative, and sometimes fanciful narratives out of facts. “Calafia” comprises a new series of epic paintings in which Ford depicts California through an amalgam of its myths, legends, and folklore. In a sixteenth century novel, Las sergas de Esplandían (The Adventures of Esplandian), the Castilian author Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo wrote of a fictitious island, inhabited by enormous flying griffins. On this island lived a tribe of Amazons, ruled by a warrior queen named Calafia. When the Spanish sailed up the western coast of North America, they named the land after this same imaginary island they had read about— Echoing this process, in which fantasy makes its way into the landscape of reality, Ford creates various creatures, both real and invented, in the Californian image-scape, using his characteristic meticulous rendering. In Grifo de California (2017), a hybrid creature sits in a clearing at the top of a mountain, evidently endangered by human encroachment. Instead of the griffin traditionally depicted in European art and fantasy, which is half-lion, half-eagle, Ford creates a “New World" griffin by merging species native to California; he combines the lower body of a mountain lion, and the talons, beak, and blue-black shimmering feathers of the critically endangered California condor, the largest North American land bird. In a ten-by-five foot watercolor, the iconic MGM studio lion is reimagined in the role of a decadent movie star,

Edition details

• Publisher: Gagosian Gallery
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1938748484
• ISBN 13: 9781938748486
• Binding: Hardcover