An excerpt from the Walton Ford studio visit in Whitewall's Winter 2012 Luxury Issue out now. All photos by Jesse Shadoan.
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WALTON FORD
By Scott Indrisek
Photographs by Jesse Shadoan
Walton Ford is known as a watercolor painter of animals, who self-consciously models himself in the vein of a James Audubon and creates scenes that are often rife with violence and absurdity. This past November, in a show at New York’s Paul Kasmin Gallery, he debuted a series of three monumental canvases inspired by King Kong. But, as Whitewall discovered when he spoke to us from his studio in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the Kong work has as much to do with Ford’s own recent trials and travails as it does with any cinematic simians. The paintings are a unique addition to the growing menagerie of this painter, who is never afraid to speak his mind.
WHITEWALL: Let’s start by talking about King Kong. Your work in the past has been drawn from realistic elements of nature; this seems the first time you’re drawing from a fantasy source.
WALTON FORD: It’s definitely a departure. I was a kid who grew up in the suburbs of New York City, so there wasn’t a lot of nature that wasn’t heavily husbanded. There’d be a little margin of woods along a golf course or something, but very little in the sense of wild landscape. As a kid growing up, I used to see King Kong on television, the 1933 original with Fay Wray. I was absolutely riveted. It was almost my entry into the interests that I have, generally, in natural history. Sure, it was complete fantasy, but it was real enough to me, you know?
WW: Were you most fascinated by the parts of the movie where Kong is in his natural element?
WF: Skull Island definitely was the place I wanted to be, with the dinosaurs. The real excitement in the movie for me was this idea of going someplace that was so outrageously exotic and wild. Kong trashing New York is more like the consequences of the action. It’s one of the most lushly beautiful movies ever made. The people making the sets were looking at Gustave Doré engravings. They were looking at paintings from Charles Knight, the great natural history artist of the 1920s who was the first to make credible dinosaur reconstructions, really beautifully rendered from comparative anatomy.
WW: So in some ways this is what sparked your interest in the natural world?
WF: I had very little natural world to be exposed to. My dad was a great outdoorsman. I loved going on fishing trips, up to Canada. I took to it. Later, after my parents divorced, we moved to a place in the Hudson Valley, in Croton. It turns out I got very comfortable in the wilderness. I do long-distance backpacking now, crazy backpacking adventure travel. But as a kid it was all in my head: The idea of being in some wild and untamed place where there were dangers lurking.
WW: When you decided that you wanted to tackle the figure of Kong in these new works, I’m assuming you went through a few options as to how you’d portray him. The three paintings are all similarly cropped.
WF: They’re close-up images of King Kong’s face going through different stages of grief. My work has always dealt with pop culture in a sense. My interest was never in animals in nature. I’m not the least bit interested in making a nature painting in the traditional sense. It’s much more about cultural perceptions of animals; animals through the human imagination is my subject. There’s not one painting I’ve done that’s like, “This is what an animal is like when there’s no human observers; this is an animal without people.” Almost all the nature art you’ll see is trying to do that — remove the presence of human beings.
WW: Is the human in your work?
WF: It’s always there. There are cultural references in every single painting. Almost all the monkeys I’ve painted were peoples’ pets. I’ll have read a story about, say, a famous person — like Sir William Hamilton, the British ambassador to Naples in the 18th century. He had a pet monkey named Jack who died and was mourned like a human being. Jack’s role in Hamilton’s life was that of a sort of out-of-control court jester. He would grab male visitors by the testicles and then smell his hand. Here’s this man [Hamilton] who has to function as a courtier, with impeccable manners and diplomacy — but here’s his monkey, acting out in the wildest possible way. He loved Jack as much as he loved any person in his life. I’m not painting a monkey in nature — he likes to eat bananas or something. I painted Jack on his deathbed, this figure of 18th-century decadence, like he’s a dandy dying of syphilis. There’s a Greek sculpture of a naked boy on the table next to him, there’s a snuffed candle — a symbol of a life cut short — all this romantic imagery around him . . . and then Vesuvius is erupting in the background. I paint him as he was created by William Hamilton. It has nothing to do with the monkey. There isn’t a single painting that isn’t painted from a point of view similar to that, you see. And that’s where it drives me crazy when people think that I’m going to be some sort of person who loves animals, is [into] PETA or something. No, I’m only interested in people! King Kong isn’t a story until the chick shows up.
WW: You’re only interested in that moment when humans and animals are meeting at some point . . .
WF: Interaction! How the culture wants to perceive an ape is the way into King Kong, basically. Kong’s an imaginary animal, but Jack on his deathbed — he’s sort of an imaginary animal, too. And these paintings are an exploration of grief as much as they are paintings of King Kong. I had my father die, I got a divorce, I had a girlfriend, we broke up — all this stuff happened in the last few years. I’ve been through this process of grief, overwhelming. It feels huge like this. This is a really personal set of paintings, exploring the enormity of grief and how it can rake you over. I bring Kong through it. Because basically his story, the original 1933 King Kong, is a story of complete rejection. He loves her, the minute he sees her, and he can’t have her. There are huge physical problems. She [Fay Wray] screams the entire movie and tries to get to her boyfriend. In the later remakes they dampen it — she makes friends with the monkey. It would be more like Beauty and the Beast or Romeo and Juliet rather than say, Lolita. He’s a monster that’s unlovable. His way of loving her is completely inappropriate, it’s not going to be reciprocated, and it couldn’t be more hopeless. His heartbreak is manifested in rage. He just kills everybody.
