Walton Ford – Graphic Works 2022 by Lyndsey Ingram

WALTON FORD 1

WALTON FORD

2nd March – 1st April 2022 Lyndsey Ingram 20 Bourdon Street London W1K 3PL T. +44 (0)20 7629 8849 E. info@lyndseyingram.com W. lyndseyingram.com

WALTON FORD Graphic Works

FOREWORD Lyndsey Ingram

It has been a long held ambition of mine to show Walton Ford’s prints in London and I am now delighted to be presenting this comprehensive exhibition. I remember clearly how captured I was the first time I saw an aquatint by Walton, over 15 years ago. My interest in printmaking as well as a fascination with Audubon made the work immediately compelling. It is impossible to view these prints and not be struck by Walton’s mastery of the traditional and very complicated colour aquatint technique. The time, knowledge, and technical ability required to make these prints cannot be understated. Together with his printer Peter Pettengill, Walton has made a truly remarkable body of prints. Beyond their technical mastery, the subjects Walton addresses in his work – social histories, global politics, environmental destruction – make these often complicated, dark narratives hugely relevant to our modern world. The combination of their historic character and contemporary narratives gives a tension to the work that is compelling – they are charged in equal measure with the weight of the past and the responsibilities of the future. Bangalore, 2004 (detail) 8

This show would not have been possible without the help of several colleagues to whom we are deeply grateful. Judith Goldman first approached us with the idea and has provided endless support, encouragement, and insight. I would also like to thank Samantha Rees at Kasmin Gallery, who has been incredibly helpful in all of the logistical challenges and Peter Pettengill of Wingate Studio, who has generously consigned several works to the show. Judith Solodkin and Smith College have provided us with images of early works, which has allowed this catalogue to be a complete survey of Walton’s print work to date. Derriere L'Etoile Studio and the Tamarind Institute have provided us with needed documentation And lastly, I must thank Walton himself and his studio manager, Robert Allen for supporting us in this project and allowing us to bring this remarkable show to the UK.

Dying Words, 2005 (detail) 11

EXCERPTS FROM A CONVERSATION WITH WALTON FORD Dodie Kazanjian

DODIE KAZANJIAN: Your pictures are far more complex than the perfectly realised natural history studies they appear to be at first glance. Each contains a narrative or narratives within narratives, with social and political messages that usually have to do with the baleful effects of Western domination over nature or older Third World cultures. What narrative or narratives do you have floating around in your head now? WALTON FORD: I have to disagree a little. It isn't always about baleful effects. Tell me. I'm interested in effects that are unforeseen, no matter what they be. What's going on now around the world with the way technology is changing the world, and the way our nation is so aggressively exporting the idea of globalism. The acceleration of that process seemed to me the single most interesting thing I saw when I travelled in North Africa, in India, in Mexico, wherever. Sometimes 12

horribly negative, sometimes positive. There are hip-hop artists in London, like Talvin Singh, who make music that's based on traditional Indian structures, but with hip-hop rhythms – the Asian Underground. That's just an example of the kind of fusion that would have been unanticipated and isn't necessarily negative. I was interested to read about that Pakistani reporter who went to see Osama bin Laden – not the last time he saw him when bin Laden was foaming at the mouth, but a previous time when he was entertained by bin Laden. What was served was a roasted sheep and Pepsi. That's it, in a nutshell. When you're in Asia, and it's dusty and you've been on a long bus ride and the water is questionable at best and the tea has got cinders in it, you think nothing could be more delicious than a Pepsi or a Coke. It comes out of this can that's completely sealed up. It had to be trucked in at great expense – it's a delicacy. Even for Osama. Humour is key to your work.

You begin wanting to make serious work and then you realize that's not the game at all. At the end of the day, someone like R. Crumb becomes a more important artist than was originally realized – well, it's realized now.

he studied. He shot birds off the decks of ships. The stories he'd tell about his own life were much more complicated and interesting than the deified version of him as some beautiful, Thoreau-like naturalist.

What narratives are you thinking up now?

How did that affect your work at that point?

It's all part of the body of work started in '91, when I began thinking about Audubon. It's connected to an earlier body of work concerned with my Southern ancestors. The family goes back a long way on both sides. They owned massive plantations with slaves from Nashville all the way to Georgia. I became interested in the trappings of that life where you had Audubon prints on the wall and gentlemen naturalist hunters. Those characters were in my family, and indeed I knew and grew up with them. Audubon was a big part of that. I started copying him as a child, trying to learn how he created his drawings, making my own versions, Later, I got into exploring the darker aspects of Audubon's character. The sportsman nature. That and the crazy personality he had. Again, I don't want to always say I'm looking for the injurious effects, but what interested me was that he wasn't a balanced figure like George Washington. He had a wild temper, he was a liar, he had about five different biographies he'd trot out for people when they'd ask him who he was. He made enemies everywhere he went. He was repulsed by native Americans. He shot so many more birds than

I had to address it, because it felt a lot like my family history-not negative, just plain old interesting. When I was growing up, Robert E. Lee was a hero and Sherman was a villain. The fact that you could overturn those ideas a tiny bit and maybe make a figure like Sherman more human and a figure like Lee more flawed was interesting to me. It's storytelling. Yeah, I just saw the Brueghel drawings show at the Met, and they are in turn funny and horrifying, disgusting and charming, sentimental and sarcastic. They've got it all. People can think the drawings are grotesque, but they're also lyrical and touching. He did a drawing for an engraving called Hope, which shows a pregnant woman holding her belly and praying to God that her baby is healthy. He's touching on everything beautiful as well. There's irony in Hope, too – shipwrecked men are drowning in the ocean, but there are also people taking buckets of the same water and putting out a fire in a house. The men are hoping to get out of the water, and the people in the fire are hoping that the water will quench the fire. It shows that the world is so complicated. 13

You've talked about not wanting to paint in a photographic kind of way. You want to get the flatness of nineteenth-century natural-history drawings. The thing that makes older naturalhistory art so beautiful is that it conveys a lot of information about the species being represented. If it's a bird, they flatten it out to show different plumages and different angles. It's the urge to cram as much information in those images as possible, and describe a type – the most exciting being an image where the artist is painting an animal for the first time. That moment of exploration, the contact and excitement that gets into the work also interests me. The entry level to a Walton Ford painting is dazzling draughtsmanship and sheer knock-out visual pleasure. Beauty in art, representation, realism, are sometimes seen as decorative or retrograde. Can you address this? Why is it valid to be painting this way, with Old-World techniques today? What are you adding to the lexicon of painting that hasn't been done before? It's never been an issue for me. When I look at that Brueghel show or naturalhistory images from the nineteenth century, or when I look at Sir John Tenniel, Edward Lear, J. J. Grandville, and all the people I study, I don't see their methods or language as being dead at all. Do you consider yourself a conceptual artist? 14

As far as the idea of working with a concept and trying to see it through, yes. Who is the artist who sent a peacock in his stead to the Venice Biennale? He called it "The Ambassador." He's from Mexico City... Francis Alys. That feels like one of my pieces. It's a joke, it's funny, it's beautiful. A couple of years ago, you said to me: ''I'd rather my heroes were kind of half creeps, because that's what life is really like." Who are your heroes today? Certain people I can't stop thinking about. Even then I was talking a lot about the explorer Sir Richard Burton, a loose cannon, alienating everybody, screwing his way around the world, becoming fluent in all these languages, and translating erotic texts. At the same time, he's like a Delta Force character. He gets a spear through his head, and he's an incredible spy, fighter, and swordsman. I like these crazy, over-the-top characters who hardly exist anymore. Often they were also heavy-duty intellectuals. In the nineteenth century, the British empire was particularly rich with these characters. I was reading a book called Tournament of Shadows, which is about the area we're engaged in now – Central Asia, Tibet, and Afghanistan. It's about Britain and Russia trying to gain influence there. It's the same thing Kipling's Kim was about. Are you thinking of doing a painting about this? I'm in the middle of painting a picture about this.

Can you talk about this painting? I think it's going to be called "Eothen," a Greek word that means "of or from the East." There's a memoir called Eothen by Alexander Kinglake, about his travels in the Holy Land. It's one of the most enjoyable works of travel literature. Anyway, it's an image of a peacock in a desert landscape with mountains in the background. The peacock is following a viper, which is slithering along in front of it. The peacock's tail has been burnt off and it's smouldering as he drags it along. There are starlings, my Western interlopers, all over the peacock's back, watching the proceedings. It's a weird little introspective moment. The image just popped into my head and it seemed exactly right.

As a child it was my favourite place in the world. My parents would take me there when we went to the city. The wall texts and those crazy dioramas with painting and animals and taxidermy were a wealth of information. There's so much to know, so much freaky stuff, and I want to pass that feeling along. I'm also interested in the coding that is perfected in guys like Brueghel and Bosch, where it's partially private. Those Brueghel drawings I was talking about have a tremendous layering of code, and yet they always communicate to us, no matter what, even in the areas that are really mysterious. But they also use the language of realism. Yes, so we can start to make some connections.

This started after September 11.

Brueghel, Bosch. Who else?

Yes.

There are all those natural history guys, like Edward Lear. There's J. J. Grandville, who made all those pictures in the nineteenth century with animals dressed as people – creepy, dressed up animals, much more like a bad dream than some cute Mickey Mouse version. Then there's Goya. You can make these lists and it seems unbelievably arrogant. But these guys are influences, I look at them and realize that's how to make a successful thing. If you're looking at a Goya print from the Los Disparates series, say, that's what you're trying to approach. He uses animals, he uses people, he uses allegory, and he's making comment. He's the perfect answer to critics who try to get you not to make work with overt

Are we the starlings? Yeah, the starling has the same natural history that we do. It's a European bird that was exported around the world, and I'm interested in using it as a stand – in for myself, or for Western attempts to influence global events. Your paintings envelop portraiture, landscape, and still life all in one. You also use words. I'm trying to cram in as much as possible. It has to do with going to places like the American Museum of Natural History.

political content. When it doesn't work, it's like Russian propaganda art or thirties mural paintings that are about social justice. But when it does work, it becomes eternal, and the most incredible piece of art you've ever looked at. So in all humility, to shoot for that, is worthy. If critics want to say, l'm no Goya, I'm the first to agree. But to try to make images that have political content is not in itself doomed to failure, which is what you're led to believe when you leave art school. You majored in film at Rhode Island School of Design. You said you were a terrible filmmaker, but that you had stories to tell. You said, "Narrative was the thing that was bugging me." You told me you thought Aguirre, the Wrath of God was "beyond anything I can paint." I was wondering what movies you've seen lately that are beyond anything you can paint. I don't see anybody making movies now of the kind of stories I want to tell. They made them briefly, like McCabe and Mrs. Miller. That's a story that dovetails perfectly with the stuff I'm interested in. Pinpoint the stuff you are interested in. There are themes I always go back to – books with stories that are not particularly well known about a particular place that interests me, like Central Asia or Latin America or India or books about natural history. I have a book called Wild Animals in Captivity by Heini Hediger, which was originally written for zookeepers. One story is about a female black panther that escaped from 16

the zoo in Zurich. She ranged through Switzerland in the dead of winter for several months and survived by preying on livestock and sleeping in barns. It's a crazy story of this tropical cat, making it in Switzerland in the thirties. I find a story like that, I make a picture. How did you turn to painting when you were studying film? Today, so many artists want to make films. I was studying film, but I was technologically challenged. I'm more comfortable with video, but back then, video was primitive. William Wegman came to our school and showed us his videos with the dog, and that was inspiring, but I just couldn't figure out how to develop my own voice. Godard and all those guys figured out that you could take it away from the studios; but you still had to be a kickass filmmaker to pull it off. I felt I wasn't that, and I'd go home every day and paint and not get college credit for it. So you graduated as a film major. Yes, and then I went to New York and started painting and working in dreadful jobs – mostly carpentry and restoration. I'd strip and refinish the wood in buildings like the Dakota. Now I have paintings on the walls in some of those apartments. I used to go up and down the freight elevator with the garbage, and now I go in the front door, visit a friend, and see my painting hanging on a wall. It seems that what you often like to do is turn something – an idea or expectation –

on its head, with brutal humour. Delacroix's recommendation for artists was they should all be shipped to North Africa as cabin boys, and forget their salon training. Then they should come back and live bourgeois lives and make pictures. [laughs] I buy that. You want a certain amount of stability and comfort to get your work done. That's not the case with how you work. Well, I don't have my meals served on time like Delacroix, but I do have my studio just as I want it – organized chaos. I have my little world, exactly as I want it to be, so I can work. What are your thoughts about photography? I was thinking of making a primitive camera where you would create photojournalistic, decisive moments of events like Cortez taking Mexico City. Unphotographable things. Everybody has their thing where they dream of flying or whatever, I have a tremendous urge to see the past. My thing definitely has to do with a time machine, the idea of being able to go back and see. Going back in time as opposed to going forward. The forward thing is too scary. But going back in time really interests me. Going back can be scary, too.

Totally terrifying. But there are certain things that I wished I could have seen. I would like to have known Tenochtitlan, Mexico City, just to see what that was honestly like. Cortez's men had never before seen such a sophisticated city. Going back in time, where else would you like to go? I would give anything to see Manhattan Island as Henry Hudson saw it, to see it when it was covered with forest and streams and fragrant flowers and Indians. I would have loved to have seen the passenger pigeons – the largest flocks of birds, ever. It took six days for a flock to pass overhead. You painted that. And I'm going to paint it again. Passenger pigeons used to land on branches of trees in such gigantic numbers that often the branches would break underneath their weight. I want to paint a falling branch with millions of these birds on it, all doing something different – screwing and fighting, with squabs falling out of their nests. It's a fecundity that's almost disgusting. The late curator Marcia Tucker described your work as having a strange quality of being caught between daily life and hallucination. What do you have to say about this kind of place in your work where fact and fiction coexist? Sometimes it has to do with the misinformation that results when two cultures 17

come into contact or conflict with each other. What you'll get are the earliest interactions between say whites and a new culture or a new fauna. Drawings and descriptions of it will often be completely exaggerated. The anaconda, for example, is a snake in South America that is thirty feet long. But earlier descriptions have them sixty and seventy feet long, and early drawings show them with flames coming out of their nostrils. So when we come into contact with a place like Afghanistan, the same thing happens. As if things aren't fantastic enough, they have to become more fantastic. I like making these credible natural history images that allow for deliberate mistakes and problems of accuracy and inserted fictions and anachronisms. How did animals enter your work? I've been drawing animals and birds since I was five years old, and I drew them in very similar, violent, narrative situations. I was interested in natural history – we had the Peterson guides to birds and mammals at home – and in movies like King Kong, the ultimate movie of cultural fear – fear of the unknown, of discovery, of exploration, and of finding something that could overwhelm you. When I was a kid, I obviously didn't notice any of the racist aspects of the movie. I just loved the image – these ballsy explorers going to an island and capturing this thing and bringing it to New York. It has everything in it: tragedy, allegory, hubris, animals, humour. How old were you when you saw that? 18

Five or six. It was always on TV. I own a video of it now, and still watch it. I thought of doing a series of paintings about that movie. Occasionally, Kong will turn his back on the camera and get caught in the shadows in such a way that if you were to freeze the frame, you couldn't exactly tell what you were looking at. It's just this behemoth, rather like that Goya giant, marching across the battlefield. I want to turn to bird pictures. Is there any one in particular that stands out for you? Sensations of an Infant Heart is about Audubon's earliest memory. His mother kept a menagerie in their house, and she had a monkey that strangled Audubon's favourite parrot when Audubon was a tiny child. He said there wasn't a day that went by he didn't think of that. He went hysterical when it happened, because he loved the parrot, and that gave rise to his love for birds. But later, he's like the monkey, a killer of birds himself. He never painted an image of this, so I just had to. The monkey's looking at us. He's got that weird, calm demeanour that animals have when they kill other animals, like cats with mice, where they have a careless look on their faces. It's one of the things that disturbs us when we watch animals eating each other – how they do it, without any emotion. Why did you start using watercolours instead of oils?

I kept returning to the watercolour because it's more like field notes and journal entries. The oils were nice, but they have a different association – they make me think of guys like Martin J. Heade, who painted hummingbirds or those sixteenth century allegorical paintings about the New World. It seemed the watercolour has more resonance. There's also the urge to do something that hasn't been done before. I realized that the watercolours I was looking at were done in notebooks or on small pages, but to make them life-size – five by ten feet or twelve by eighteen feet – was something that had never been done.

along with the bronzes and all the rest of what I want to do. I think the best work is ahead of me. Hopefully when it's all said and done, there will be sculptures and prints and film and probably photography. It's all got to get done before I croak. The problem is the glut of ideas. This conversation took place in New York City in 2002.

Are you thinking about oils in the future? Yes. I have ideas that I would only paint in oils. I've always wanted to paint an allegory at the American Museum of Natural History, where all the contents of the museum are displayed and spilling out onto the front entryway, with the great equestrian sculpture of Theodore Roosevelt facing Central Park. I have those allegorical pictures of the continents by Jan Van Kessel in mind. It would be a real epic. It would have to be a big, huge oil painting, wouldn't it? Central Park would suddenly become wilderness. You'd leave the steps of the museum and plunge into the darkness of other continents and jungles. There would be fires and craziness, and the park would no longer be the park. It would be the wilds. I haven't had the opportunity to make this picture yet, 19

THE BLUE HERON PRINTS Judith Goldman

In 1997, Paul Kasmin and I formed the Blue Heron Press to publish prints by Walton Ford. We named it Blue Heron because at the time Walton was making large watercolours of various, exotic birds and because Paul and I both liked blue herons. When I was researching graphic studios where Walton might work, the painter Bruce Porter suggested we talk to Peter Pettengill. A few months later, we traveled to the Berkshires, picked Walton up at his Great Barrington studio, and drove to New Hampshire to meet Peter Pettengill, master printer and proprietor of Wingate Studio. We had a plan – if things worked out, if Walton took to etching and liked collaborating with Peter, he would create a series of six prints. Walton finished Swadeshi-cide, an image of a Common Grey Hornbill sitting on a branch in late 1998. Five prints followed; each took approximately a year to complete, each was very different from the one that preceded it. The images are, by turns, fierce, enigmatic, combative and reflective. Their formats sometimes 20

allude to natural history illustrations or to an Audubon bird. But the similarity ends there. Walton Ford turns the conventions of natural history illustration inside out. His birds are not specimens of their kind but are characters in subtly told visual dramas; they are stand-ins and metaphors that hold complex narratives ranging from geopolitical problems on the Indian subcontinent to the Tawny Owl, “Old Brown” featured in a Beatrix Potter children’s story. In the years since completing the series, Walton Ford has continued to work at Wingate Studio and other graphic workshops, where he has produced an impressive body of printed art. Earlier this year, Robert Allen, manager of Walton’s New York studio, spoke with him about his experiences making prints An edited version of Walton’s answers follows.

Limed Blossoms, 2007 (detail)

ETCHING SUITS ME Walton Ford

Like a lot of children, the first thing I drew was animals. I grew up in a family where hunting and fishing were part of the culture. We had natural history books, field guides, a reproduction of Audubon’s Birds of America. As a child, I copied these things. Later when I became a professional artist, Goya appealed to my interest in the grotesque and in making invisible states visible. Anyone who attempts etching ends up with an admiration for Goya. I first became aware of engraving at the Rhode Island School of Design where I took an introductory printmaking class. The only print medium that I’m really drawn to is etching and aquatint. I’ve had some experience with lithography, but I haven’t found my way into that medium. Etching suits me. I love the look of it, the line quality, the feel of the copper – everything about it appeals to me. Certain mediums add a kind of gravitas to what you are doing as an artist – bronze sculpture, oil painting, black and white photography, and etching all fall into that category. 22

I do large scale watercolours with gouache, and I do etching and aquatint. The very first natural history books, such as the artist Maria Sibylla Merian’s books on metamorphosis from the 17th century, were done in a way that is similar to how I make my prints. The visual language of watercolour painting translates easily into etching and aquatint. Audubon (or his printers) translated his work into copperplate engraving. It’s the appropriate visual language for the type of imagery that I’m interested in. I’m a great admirer of Audubon’s work, of the mixture of American sparseness with a romantic vision that his images sometimes flirt with. The plates that inspire me the most are the ones with dramatic narratives (mocking birds attacking a snake or red-tailed hawks fighting over a dying rabbit). Those images directly inspire my work. I have a more complex relationship with Audubon, the man. Having read much of his writing, he can be by turns charming and repellant.

Peter Pettengill taught me everything I know about etching. I didn’t have any idea of what to do until I visited him at Wingate Studio. It’s a beautiful place. There’s a print shop on the premises, but there’s also a working organic farm that’s been in the family for generations. The bucolic setting allows me to concentrate on the work; there’s little distraction except for the beauty of nature. I’ve been working with Peter so long that I’ve grown to love him and his family. I’m blessed with this relationship. Working there feels like being part of the family business; at this point Peter and I can finish each other’s thoughts. I don’t collaborate with anyone in my work – except Peter, who is a true collaborator. I never thought it was possible to collaborate with anybody, since I have such a singular vision for my work. It really came as a surprise. To be sure, etching is a difficult medium, but it’s one I feel comfortable with. Making a colour etching is like flying on instruments. You can’t immediately see the results. It’s like photographing with film, developing it, and then looking at the print and realizing “this is overexposed; we have to reshoot it.” The results can’t be seen in the moment. You need to have faith in your ability to make projections. It requires a high degree of flexibility – you have to be able to make changes, to rub things out. It’s a hyper-advanced practice that’s not for everyone. What’s uncanny is how often Peter and I get it right.

incredible. But this type of mastery takes years to achieve. Doing large scale watercolours was excellent training because the layering of transparent hues is similar. By now, we’ve seen so many things that can happen in the process, that we usually know how to fix whatever problems arise. That we’ve gotten to this point keeps me excited about making prints. The Blue Heron project unfolded over a period of more than six years. When I started it, I didn’t have a plan or a comprehensive vision. I was just going to see how it went from print to print. But it was soon obvious that I had an affinity for etching, that I was going to enjoy it. I don’t approach etching any differently than I approach paintings. It’s the same intellectual process. I come up with images I feel passionate about, that I think will make striking prints. I love the historical significance of copperplate etching. The fact that I’m doing something that Rembrandt did, that I could have a technical conversation with him about etching – it’s amazing. . .

When the proof goes up on the wall and we think “Wow – nailed it,” it feels 23

Sharp Teeth, 1989 Linoleum cut and letterpress. Signed and numbered in an edition of 100. Printed on Rives paper by Peter Kruty at Solo Press, Inc., New York. Published by the artist. Plate: 30.5 × 30.3 cm (12 × 11.94 in) Sheet: 66.4 × 48.3 cm (26.13 × 19 in) 24

Six Fingers, 1989 Linoleum cut and letterpress. Signed and numbered in an edition of 100. Printed on Rives paper by Peter Kruty at Solo Press, Inc., New York. Published by the artist. Plate: 30.5 × 30.5 cm (12 × 12 in) Sheet: 66.5 × 48.1 cm (26.19 × 18.94 in) 25

A Wounded Beast at Bay, 1995 Lithograph. Signed in pencil and numbered in an edition of 15. Printed on Rives BFK paper by Frank Janzen and Bill Lagattuta at Tamarind Institute. Published by Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sheet: 76.2 × 56.5 cm (30 × 22 1/4 in) 26

The Dance Begins, 1995 Lithograph. Signed in pencil and numbered in an edition of 15. Printed on Rives BFK paper by David AfsahMohallatee and Bill Lagattuta at Tamarind Institute. Published by Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sheet: 76.2 × 56.5 cm (30 × 22 1/4 in) 27

Farewell to Ambikapur, 1995 Lithograph with collage. Signed in pencil and numbered in an edition of 15. Printed on Rives paper by Paul Croft and Bill Lagattuta at Tamarind Institute. Published by Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sheet: 76.2 × 56.5 cm (30 × 22 1/4 in) 28

Tiger Superstitions, 1995 Lithograph. Signed in pencil and numbered in an edition of 15. Printed on Rives BFK paper by Bill Lagattuta at Tamarind Institute. Published by Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Sheet: 76.2 x 56.5 cm (30 x 22 1/4 in) 29

Swadeshi-cide, 1998 Etching and aquatint with drypoint and hand-colouring. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 50. Printed on white Somerset Satin paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Blue Heron Press Inc., New York. Plate: 91.4 × 61 cm (36 × 24 in) Sheet: 111.8 × 78.7 cm (44 × 31 in) £22,000 + 5% VAT 30

Swadeshi-cide

ln his quest for lndia’s independence from Great Britain, Mahatma Gandhi chose Swadeshi homespun lndian cotton as his symbol, Walton Ford’s image, Swadeshi-cide metaphorically depicts how Gandhi’s goals for self-sufficiency have been thwarted in the ensuing post-independence decades. ln Hindi, cide means kill; this is underscored by the extended title “patents pending” and the Hindi phrase “stop thief.” Ford here highlights the corruption that has made traditional agrarian practices illegal in lndia. For instance, lndia once had many distinctive strains of rice, each adapted to local climatic and geographic conditions. Farmers would save a portion of each crop to use as seed for the next year. The government allowed foreign companies to patent native rice strains; hybridized, these genetically sterilized seeds were sold to the farmers at the insistence of the government. The seeds were incompatible with local conditions, and farmers’ crops often failed, forcing them to purchase

more seed for each futile crop. (Not self-sufficiency as conceived by Gandhi.) The native neem tree was the source of a natural pesticide any farmer could easily extract. After the rights to the genetic material and to the process of pesticide extraction had been sold to a multinational company, a farmer could be fined for using this centuries-old process without paying for the privilege. Walton Ford tells this complex story with beautifully depicted birds in a rural lndian landscape. A large Common Grey Hornbill represents lndia. She sits on a branch of a neem tree in which she has a nest. She is surrounded by a sycophantic flock of indigenous and foreign birds – native Blossom-headed Parakeets and European Starlings feeding her with tempting morsels to gain control of her centuries-old nest. – David Kiehl

Swadeshi-cide, 1998 (detail) 33

La Historia Me Absolvera, 1999 Etching and aquatint with drypoint. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 50. Printed on white Somerset Satin paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Blue Heron Press Inc., New York. Plate: 91.4 × 61 cm (36 × 24 in) Sheet: 111.8 × 78.7 cm (44 × 31 in) £25,500 + 5% VAT 34

La Historia Me Absolvera

Once numerous, the brightly-coloured Cuban red macaw is now extinct. Walton Ford’s solitary, splendidly feathered macaw sits on a branch, beset by pesky flies and surrounded by various traps to capture him. The clue to the allegory is in the title, “La historia me absolvera” – “History will absolve me.” This was Fidel Castro’s final statement in a lengthy declaration against the abuses and corruption of the Batista government, delivered as his self-defense during a secret trial after the failed attack on an army barracks in Santiago, Cuba, in 1953. Sentenced to fifteen years in prison, Castro was released two years later under a general amnesty for political prisoners; four years after that, Batista fled as Castro’s forces seized Havana. Attempts to oust Castro by force or assassination in the early 1960s failed; Castro remained president of Cuba until his resignation in 2008. Ford here illustrates these attempts to unseat Castro as flies and traps, and adds a text about bombrigged seashells and a fungus-impregnated diving suit. But only the future will answer Castro’s defiant statement of 1953. – David Kiehl

La Historia Me Absolvera, 1999 (detail) 37

Benjamin's Emblem, 2000 Etching and aquatint with drypoint. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 50. Printed on white Somerset Satin paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Blue Heron Press Inc., New York. Plate: 91.4 × 61 cm (36 × 24 in) Sheet: 111.8 × 78.7 cm (44 × 31 in) £25,500 + 5% VAT 38

Benjamin’s Emblem

ln 1784, the Congress of the newly established United States sought an appropriate heraldic symbol for the new Federal govemment. As the discussions focused on the bald eagle, Benjamin Franklin proposed that Congress consider the merits of the native turkey. ln a letter to his daughter he wrote that I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character, like those among men who live by sharping and robbing... The turkey is a much more respectable bird." One of the grandest plates in Audubon's The Birds of America (London, 1827-33) is the wild turkey.

premise underlying Walton Ford's Benjamin's Emblem. Unlike the noble fowl of Audubon's plate that epitomizes the virtues that Franklin deemed essential for the individual citizen and the nation, Ford's turkey has evolved into a leaner and meaner, more bellicose bird, fully imbued with the character of the eagle. This turkey is depicted at the kill; in his claws is the hapless corpse of the native, and now extinct, Carolina parrot whose communal habits made it easy prey for hunters. Ford's image raises a second question: Has America lost sight of its essential nature outlined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights?

What if Franklin had prevailed in his choice of a natural bird? This is the initial

– David Kiehl

Benjamin's Emblem, 1998 (detail) 41

The Tale of Johnny Nutkin, 2001 Etching and aquatint with drypoint. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 50. Printed on white Somerset Satin paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Blue Heron Press Inc., New York. Plate: 91.4 × 61 cm (36 × 24 in) Sheet: 111.8 × 78.7 cm (44× 31 in) £22,000 + 5% VAT 42

The Tale of Johnny Nutkin

ln Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin (London, 1903), the red squirrels desire to gather nuts on an island owned by Old Brown, a tawny owl. To do so, they must bring a gift to the owl. During the nut gathering, the naughty and mischievous Squirrel Nutkin taunts Old Brown, who finally retaliates by biting off Squirrel Nutkin’s tail. As a book for children, The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin has a moral implication about respecting one’s elders and one’s “betters” – a popular admonishment in the hierarchical social order of late-Victorian England. Walton Ford’s depiction of angry squirrels taunting and attacking a startled tawny owl suggests a new scenario that moves Potter’s tale into a metaphor for contemporary Great Britain and the political and social agenda of Tony Blair’s New Labour government. ln 2000, Blair and the Labour-dominated House of Commons succeeded in bringing an abrupt change to Parliament’s second house, the House of Lords. they revoked the centuries old hereditary right of peers to sit in the House of Lords, a giant step toward a more egalitarian British society. – David Kiehl

The Tale of Johnny Nutkin, 2001 (detail) 44

Compromised, 2002 Etching and aquatint with drypoint and roulette. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 50. Printed on white Somerset Satin paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Blue Heron Press Inc., New York. Plate: 91.4 × 61 cm (36 × 24 in) Sheet: 111.8 × 78.7 cm (44 × 31 in) £22,000 + 5% VAT 46

Compromised

Compromised is one of Walton Ford’s more enigmatic images. Two ibises tussle on the banks of the Nile – the glossy ibis and the sacred ibis. The ranges of both birds overlap in the countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea; the glossy ibis’ range extends to the Western Hemisphere. The quotation is taken from the opening chapter of Alexander Kinglake’s Eothen (London, 1844) in which he describes his journey within the Ottoman Empire at a time when Europe feared the plague. A compromised person was “one who has been in contact with people or things supposed to be capable of conveying infection.” Mere contact required fourteen days in quarantine at the Lazaretto in Semlin, a city on the border between the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman territories” Those who evaded the quarantine laws could be tried by a military tribunal and shot. Kinglake described crossing this territorial border with “as much solemnity as if we had been departing this life.” The illusions to contemporary geopolitical events are thought-provoking. – David Kiehl

Compromised, 2002 (detail) 49

Visitation, 2004 Etching and aquatint with drypoint. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 50. Printed on white Somerset Satin paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Blue Heron Press Inc. New York. Plate: 91.4 × 61 cm (36 × 24 in) Sheet: 111.8 × 78.7 cm (44 × 31 in) £22,000 + 5% VAT 50

Visitation

ln March 1631, Thomas Dudley, then deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, wrote a letter to the wife (Lady Bridget, Countess of Lincoln) of his former employer, recounting his first year in the new colony. Toward the end of his account of the vicissitudes of colonial life – the struggle to obtain and store provisions, the lamented deaths amongst the settlers – he records that large flocks of passenger pigeons flew over the newly established towns on the eighth of March, flocks large enough to block the sun. He ends the account with the quote inscribed by Walton Ford in Visitation: ‘What it portends I know not.” Who would have thought that in three hundred years, the passenger pigeon would be declared extinct? New settlers relentlessly cut down forests, domesticated prairies, and destroyed the natural habitats of this

species. The passenger pigeon’s tendency to live together in extremely large communities also made them vulnerable to a new predator – the settlers who saw these flocks as food or unwanted pests. Visitation is a visual metaphor with multiple interpretations. For instance, this well-fed flock has descended into a field to gorge on the bounty of the land – a metaphor perhaps for territorial, mercantile, or industrial colonialism that exploits the land and resources of the colonized. Walton Ford has suggested another interpretation: There is a human prosperity to place the blame on the victims of exploitation to find reasons for why they deserve to be exploited. Such justifictions are as old as the human race itself. – David Kiehl

Visitation, 2004 (detail) 52

Nila, 2000 Lithograph. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 150. Printed on Arches Cover White paper by Maurice Sanchez, James Miller and Matthew Ledzetler at Derriere L'Etoile Studios, New York. Published by Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York. Sheet: 115.3 × 80 cm (45 1/5 × 31 1/2 in) £4,000 + 5% VAT 55

New Tricks for Ancient Wings, 2001 Lithograph. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 90. Printed on Somerset Velvet paper by James Miller, Matthew Ledzetler, Maurice Sanchez and K. Kawecki at Derriere L'Etoile Studios, New York. Co-published by the artist, Derriere L'Etoile Studios and Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. Sheet: 91.4 × 69.9 cm (36 × 27 1/2 in) 56

Bangalore, 2004 Etching and aquatint with drypoint. Signed in pencil and numbered in an edition of 75. Printed on Rives BFK paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Paul Kasmin Editions, New York. Plate: 30.5 × 22.9 cm (12 × 9 in) Sheet: 54.6 × 40.6 cm (21.5 × 16 in) £9,500 59

Dying Words, 2005 Etching and aquatint with drypoint. Signed in pencil and numbered in an edition of 75. Printed on Rives BFK paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Paul Kasmin Editions, New York. Plate: 35.6 × 45.7 cm (14 × 18 in) Sheet: 57.1 × 76.2 cm (22.5 × 30 in) £12,500 60

Limed Blossoms, 2007 Etching and aquatint. Signed in pencil and numbered in an edition of 100. Printed on Rives BFK paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Taschen, Cologne, Germany. Plate: 30.5 × 22.9 cm (12 × 9 in) Sheet: 47 × 35.6 cm (18.5 × 14 in) £9,500 63

Condemned, 2007 Etching and aquatint with drypoint. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 75. Printed on Rives BFK paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Paul Kasmin Editions, New York. Plate: 30.5 × 22.9 cm (12 × 9 in) Sheet: 54.6 × 40.6 cm (21.5 × 16 in) £9,500 + 5% VAT 64

Nantes, 2009 Etching and aquatint with drypoint. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 65. Printed on white Somerset Satin paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Paul Kasmin Editions, New York. Plate: 101.6 × 76.2 cm (40 × 30 in) Sheet: 121.9 × 94 cm (48 × 37 in) £12,500 67

It Makes Me Think of That Awful Day On the Island, 2011 Lithograph. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 50. Printed on Somerset Soft White paper by Maurice Sanchez at Derrier L'Etoile Studios, New York. Published by Exit Art, New York. Sheet: 55.8 × 76.2 cm (22 × 30 in) £5,200 + 5% VAT 68

MCMLXII-MMXII, 2012 Etching with aquatint and drypoint. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 100. Printed on Rives BFK paper by Peter Pettengill and Caitlin Riordan at Wingate Studios, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York. Plate: 57.15 × 76.2 cm (22 1/2 × 30 in) Sheet: 85.1 × 101.6 cm (33.5 × 40 in) £6,000 + 5% VAT 71

Pestvogel, 2016 Etching and aquatint with drypoint. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 65. Printed on white Somerset Satin paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York. Plate: 71.1 × 55.9 cm (28 × 22 in) Sheet: 101.6 × 78.1 cm (40 × 30.75 in) £14,000 + 5% VAT 72

Killy, 2019 Etching and aquatint with drypoint. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 65. Printed on Rives BFK paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Kasmin Gallery, New York. Plate: 50.8 × 38.1 cm (20 × 15 in) Sheet: 74.93 × 57.15 cm (29.5 × 22.5 in) £10,000 75

Granary, 2020 Etching and aquatint with drypoint. Signed, dated and numbered in an edition of 100. Printed on Rives BFK paper by Peter Pettengill at Wingate Studio, Hinsdale, New Hampshire. Published by Taschen, Cologne, Germany. Plate: 30.5 × 22.9 cm (12 × 9 in) Sheet: 47 × 35.6 cm (18.5 × 14 in) 76

Walton Ford's beautifully rendered works on paper look like large-scale descendents of the eighteenth and nineteenthcentury tradition of documenting the world's fauna. They recall the familiar plates in John James Audubon's majestic publication, The Birds af America (London, 1827-35). But look more closely. Ford provides a multitude of clues for understanding his images. Cryptic titles, quotations from a variety of literary sources, and other pictorial details contribute to a metaphorical complexity that delves into mankind's historical, political, economic and sociological presence on this planet. – David Kiehl

Condemned, 2007 (detail) 78

Published by Lyndsey Ingram 20 Bourdon Street London W1K 3PL T. +44 (0)20 7629 8849 E. info@lyndseyingram.com W. lyndseyingram.com © 2022 Lyndsey Ingram All images © 2022 Walton Ford Cover image: La Historia Me Absolvera, 1999 Pages 8 – 15, Excerpts from a conversation with Walton Ford © 2022 Dodie Kazanjian. Reprinted with kind permission of Kasmin gallery Page 16, The Blue Heron Prints © 2022 Judith Goldman Pages 18 – 19, Etching Suits Me © 2022 Walton Ford Pages 29, 33, 37, 40, 45, 48, 74, Notes on The Big Birds © 2022 David Kiehl All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Lyndsey Ingram. Designed by Lucy Harbut Printed by Dayfold