Detail of  ‘Dirty Dick Burton’s Aide de Camp’ 2002 (detail)

Meet Walton Ford, my new favorite artist.

I’ll spare you my opinions of his work and instead quote Walton discussing his own work:

“The big, big thing I’m always looking for in my work is a sort of attraction-repulsion thing, 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. Or that it’s some sort of interior monologue.”

“Why do I feel the need to make these things? Why is it that you want to make them as disturbing as you can? Or as violent and out of control as you can? That just comes from some place that doesn’t bear up under theoretical discussion.”

“They are like gigantic pages from journals. They don’t make any sense. The early natural history artists used to carry little sketchbooks with them. I’ve taken the exact techniques and the exact kind of paper and calligraphy that they used and made this enormous version that makes no sense. There would be no reason for a natural history study that was ten feet by five feet. But that is one of the things I was interested in doing. Taking small bits of history and magnifying them.”

“I have an ongoing project that has to do with Sir Richard Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer. One of the stories that stuck with me was about monkeys that he kept in his quarters when he was a young officer…The thing about this monkey picture is Richard Burton is keeping forty monkeys in his quarters when he’s a young officer to learn their language. There’s something just right away that strikes me as humorous in the quintessentially super-eccentric British way and their mode of building an empire which was carried out by these kinds of eccentrics”

Introduction via Clayton Cubbit, a great artist in his own right. Spend some time with his portraits of Katrina Survivors.