"At this time in my life, I’m ready to accept or own a kind of romance and melancholy or melodrama that I wasn’t ready to reveal before. It was always there in my inner life as an artist, but I was too afraid to share it."
—Laurie Simmons
SEGMENT: Walton Ford in "Humor"
From "Art in the Twenty-First Century" Season 2 (2003)
About
A voracious reader of colonial letters and diaries, Walton Ford is fascinated by the fear and wonder of nature that he finds in historical texts. “The big thing I’m always looking for in my work is a sort of attraction-repulsion, where the stuff is beautiful to begin with until you notice that some sort of horrible violence is about to happen or is in the middle of happening.” Commenting on a large watercolor depicting a frenzy of birds falling with a massive branch, he explains that the birds are “satisfying all their lusts...as they are going down.” Contrasting the romanticized tradition of Audubon with the destructive qualities of existence, Ford merge a dreamlike vision with a frenetic and comic reality.
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