Walton Ford, Pancha Tantra
Introduction by Bill Buford,
Illustrations by Walton Ford.
Taschen
Reviewed by Annie Kelly

Don’t be fooled by the sumptuous and naturalistic images in Walton Ford, Pancha Tantra; this is not conventional 19th-century imagery of beautifully rendered animals and birds, in fact, this extraordinary and sometimes shocking book should come with a warning label.

This compilation of the last 10 years of artist Walton Ford’s watercolor and gouache depictions of the animal kingdom reveals the beauty as well as the instinctive cruelty of the creatures he depicts in skillful detail. Taschen has done it again, with yet another big plate illustrated book that grabs your attention immediately, with its cover of feasting monkeys (a detail of a 2003 watercolor called The Sensorium) which crosses the boundaries between animal and human with alarming ease.

Working at his studio near Great Barrington, Massachusetts, Ford carefully researches his subject matter using the Internet, books and ideas from other much earlier artists. You would expect his main influences to be other naturalistic illustrators such as Audubon, Gould, and Lear – however, Ford draws more from traditional painters like Goya, Giotto, and Breugel and from written historical narratives. In preparation for his watercolor scenes, he sketches from the stuffed animals at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Ford uses this beautifully painted imagery to reveal the real world behind the sentimental overlay of nature and demonstrates how man can be just as cruel as nature.

The book begins with an introduction by writer Bill Buford, who links Ford’s work to writings by George Orwell, the journals of British explorer Sir Richard Burton and the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini. “Walton Ford is one of the most unmodern of modern painters,” he explains, “a pre-modernist, trying to reconnect us to a rustic, rough land that had many more animals in it, and many more animals known to the people nearby than the barren cities and suburbs where most of us now live.” The illustrations are shown either in full page or in occasional details taken from the images themselves, which also display Ford’s technical mastery. Some images will horrify the reader – like the shooting scene in American Flamingo where an iconic pink flamingo meets a bullet – while others are full of charm (depending on your point of view, of course) such as Chalo, Chalo, Chalo which depicts a large stork with a colorful collection of birds feeding off fruit from the stork’s beak.

My choices would be the most peaceful and contemplative: Dirty Dick Burton’s Aide de Camp refers to Sir Richard Burton’s infamous descriptions of 19th- century Middle Eastern sexual practices, depicted by a proud Langoor monkey holding both a letter and a hookah; or Ricordazione-Vinci 1452, based on Leonardo da Vinci’s babyhood recollection of a kite landing in his cradle “with its tail inside my lips.”

Ford works slowly, producing three or four paintings each year, which would make it hard to get an overview of his career were it were not for this book. The title, Walton Ford, Pancha Tantra refers to group of ancient Sanskrit animal fables thought to have derived from some of the earliest spoken stories, which seem to have been an obvious influence on Ford’s work.

Ford shows regularly at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York, where you can see examples of his most recent exhibition (of a year ago) and also get an idea of the scale of his paintings. Log onto www.paulkasmin.com and go to “past exhibitions” for more of Ford’s extraordinary and unexpected images.
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