Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra

2012 | Art, Photography & Fashion

This book features a natural selection: Ford's beautifully savage beasts and birds. Walton Ford's watercolors of animals could be mistaken for 19th century natural science illustrations or British colonial paintings. Except they're not. Something strange and usually sinister is happening in each of Ford's works, whether it's a wild turkey crushing a small parrot with its claw, a collection of monkeys wreaking havoc on a formally set dinner table, or an American buffalo surrounded by a pack of bloodied white wolves...in the middle of a proper French garden. Painted with the deft technique of a technical artist, Ford's works vibrate with an intensity of uncanny familiarity; they are both reassuring in style and disturbing in content. With titles like "Au Revoir Zaire", "Necropolis", and "Dirty Dick Burton's Aide de Camp", and "Space Monkey", his paintings open the doors to a world of real-life fantasy, dreams, and nightmares - all with a stunning candor that almost belies the artist's intentions.

Collected together for the first time as a limited-edition book, and now available as a popular edition, Ford's bestiary takes its name from one of the texts he frequently refers back to in his work: "The Pancha Tantra", the ancient Indian book of animal fables collected from 3rd-5th Centuries B.C. and considered to be the precursor to "Aesop's Fables". This book provides an in-depth exploration of Walton Ford's oeuvre. It also includes a complete professional biography as well as substantial excerpts from the textual sources for the paintings, from Vietnamese folktales and the letters of Benjamin Franklin to the "Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini" and John James Audubon's "Ornithological Biography".

Walton Ford (Author)

Bill Buford (Author)