Carving out a truly unique niche within the Contemporary Art World, Walton Ford has forged a path of the entrepreneur artist that is markedly different from that of other Contemporary Artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. All three men are creating works that are informed by the world around them however Walton Ford has found his inspiration not in what one can considered to be popular culture but an inspiration drawn from natural world around us and how we perceive it.
…what I’m doing is a sort of cultural history of the way animals live in the human imagination. Walton Ford in C. Tomkins “Man as Beast,” The New Yorker, New York, January 26, 2009
Rendered nearly life-sized with meticulous realism in watercolor and outshining the early 19th Century naturalists that Ford has drawn inspiration from, Loss of the Lisbon Rhino, 2008, perfectly embodies this statement. The painting captures a moment in time that had not been visually recorded to date. It becomes as Ford states “… a comment on the way we impose our culture on the natural world, but without it being dogmatic in message.”
(Walton Ford in A Kurian Whitehot Magazine, July 2008.)
In 1515 King Manuel I of Portugal had made the decision to send an Indian Rhinoceros to Rome to win the favor of the Medici Pope, Leo X. The Rhinoceros had originally been a diplomatic gift from a sultan to King Manuel I. A the time a Rhinoceros had not been seen in Europe since the times of the Romans. Such an exotic and rare gift would certainly have curried the favor of the Pope, however the gift would unfortunately never reach its destination. The ship with the rhinoceros was caught in a storm and sank off the coast of Genoa. The rhinoceros, by accounts of survivors, was chained to the deck of the ship and drowned when the vessel sank. Accounts of the exotic creature in the Portuguese Royal Court and its story made their way to Nuremburg where Albrecht Dürer used the descriptions of the beast to create his famous woodcut of the rhinoceros in 1515. Dürer’s rendering was anatomically incorrect with plates or “armor” more indicative of a crustacean than a mammal. Dürer’s Rhinoceros, although completely incorrect in its depiction, would go on to become the accepted representation of the animal until the mid 1700’s.
What Ford has done with his Loss of the Lisbon Rhino is combine the story of the ill-fated voyage of the rhino with Dürer’s account, creating a visual reference that had not yet been explored in history. He describes the experience with this painting as:
It’s quite beautifully imagined—there are particulars that are real to a rhino, but it also looks kind of like a crustacean or a crab, which is really apt since this thing drowned. So the moment of transformation, where this animal goes from an actual animal to being transformed into an icon that for 300 years people drew and believed to be a rhino, is the moment I painted. So here he’s dying, but he’ll be reborn from the ocean as this armored crustacean, and really live for another thousand years as this transmogrified creature.
Walton Ford in A. Kurian Whitehot Magazine, July 2008.
It is with his own visual investigation and interpretation of the Natural world and our “cultural history of our relationship with animals” that Ford continues to challenge what we – the viewer- have come to accept as Contemporary Art.