A professional illustrator and historical figure shaping American identity, Walton Ford describes his own work as "nasty underground cartoons"(Ford; Pbs). The painting titled Tur is located on the third floor of the Smithsonian Museum. This three-section watercolor depicts the prehistoric, extinct Aurochs. The large mammal was often mistaken for bison. They were, by law, only to be hunted by royalty. Tur, the polish translation for Aurochs, is the reincarnation from the imagination of German scientists. Aurochs symbolize the Soviet Union’s superior control during World War Two. Ford recreates his paintings in a style that is reminiscent directly of paintings by John James Audubon. Similar to Audubon, Ford’s includes field notes, although his are subtle hints at the grim background behind his paintings.
Walton Ford was born in 1960 in Larchmont, NY. Ford inherited his artistic genes from his father, Enfield Berry Ford also known as Flicky, who attended the Art Students League. His father inspired to be a cartoonist but ended up as the art director at Life magazine in New York City. Ford was quoted saying “He was a big personality, a big drinker, a womanizer, and a wild man…. Sort of hard to be around when I was a teen-ager” (Cohen). He is no stranger to the difficulties and darker sides of life and his fatherless past has contributed to creating the lens he looks through when forming his paintings.
From an early age the artist felt ostracized from nature and his only connection to wild life was through the natural museum of history and his uncle’s house, which was filled with taxidermy. His parents were divorced and his father suffered from alcoholism. His tough childhood forced Walton Ford to find humor in the challenging aspe...
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... cover art for the Rolling Stones greatest hits album GRRR! which commemorated the band's 50th Anniversary. He is held in high regard due to his dedicated pursuit of becoming a prominent artist and his work over the years has demonstrated his true passion for the arts.
Works Cited
"Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 2 (2003)." Art in the Twenty-First Century, Season 2. Art 21 Inc. Pbs, 2003. Pbs.com. Web. 2 Apr. 2014. .
Cohen, David. "Back to Basics: Painters Walton Ford and Neo Rauch." Nysun.com. The New York Sun, 22 May 2008. Web. 02 Apr. 2014. .
Williams, Raymond. 1976. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana, 1988. ISBN 0-00-686150-4.
"Walton Ford (American, 1960)." Walton Ford on Artnet. Www.Artnet.com, 2014. Web. 12 May 2014.
· 1999: Private commissions (2). Continues to work on paintings for traveling exhibition, Visual Poems of Human Experience (The Company of Art, Chronology 1999).
"Everyone is influenced by their childhood. The things I write about and illustrate come from a vast range of inputs, from the earliest impressions of a little child, others from things I saw yesterday and still others from completely out of the blue, though no doubt they owe their arrival to some stimulus, albeit unconscious. I have a great love of wildlife, inherited from my parents, which show through in my subject matter, though always with a view to the humorous—not as a reflective device but as a reflection of my own fairly happy nature.
Gardner, Helen, and Fred S. Kleiner. Gardner's Art Through the Ages: The Western Perspective. N.p., 2014. Print.
Throughout the short story “The Last Hunt of Dorax” many scenes are exposited upon in great detail in an effort to draw the reader deep into the weave of words spun by the author. Even though she used few words I often found the settings described by Olive Huck to be exceptionally beautiful, often reminding me of my own experiences in the brush lands of east Texas and southern California. Reading her work, I can truly see and feel the detail around me, pulling me in, forcing me to become invested in her characters and the outcome she has planned. After reading this short story there can be no doubt that the written word is art and in the hands of an artist such as Olive Huck can be arranged
A turning point in Rockwell’s career occurred one year later when he sold five cover illustrations to George Lorimer, editor of the “Saturday Evening Post”. For the next four decades, Rockwell’s name would be synonymous with the “Post”. During that time he produced 322 covers for the magazine.
Her poetry is greatly informed by her childhood in hockey town Swift Current, Saskatchewan, with that environmental aesthetic often forming the backdrop to her stories of poverty, alcoholism, and the natural world. As a prairie girl myself, it’s easy for me to picture the agricultural landscapes and rustic animals described in poems such as “Inventing the Hawk”. Her authorial voice is wistful yet confessional, a voice that looks back fondly, but not blind to the issues of the past. Sex is also a recurring theme of her work, and the intimacies of her relationship with her husband Patrick Lane are a common topic of her work. One of her poems, “Watching My Lover”, tells of Lane bathing his dying mother, the mother’s scent lingering "so everyone who lies with him / will know he’s still / his mother’s son". Animals from cats to horses feature heavily in her work, tying in once again to her love of nature.
It is hard to imagine Davidson, an internationally recognized Haida artist, being nervous for any reason. He has championed the Northwest, Native American art form for decades. Davidson has received three honorary doctorates, and he is the member of the Order of British Columbia and the Order of Canada. As a leading figure in the Haida Renaissance, his prints and wo...
Comparing different works of art from one artist can help a person gain a better understanding of an artist and the purpose of their artwork. An artist’s works of art usually have similarities as well as differences when compared together. Sandy Skoglund is a photographer that stages entire rooms to create a scene for her photographs. Skoglund uses painting, sculpture, and photography to create her artwork. Due to the fact that most of her photographs are created in similar ways, almost all of her photographs have similar components represented throughout the photographs. Differences can be found in her artwork as well. Skoglund’s Revenge of The Goldfish, 1981 (Figure 1), is a popular work of art that is represented at the Akron Art Museum
Even before the first Model A rolled off the assembly line, Ford had been interested in all sorts of mechanical workings growing up. Ford was born on a 90-acre farm and had a simple life growing up. But, Ford did not like plowing the fields, milking cows, or
John Ford was an American motion-picture director. Winner of four Academy Awards, and is known as one of America’s great film directors. He began his career in the film industry around 1913. According to Ellis, Ford’s style is evident in both the themes he is drawn toward and the visual treatment of those themes, in his direction of the camera and in what’s in front of it. Although he began his career in the silent film area and continued to work fruitfully for decades after the thirties, Ford reached creative maturity in the thirties. Ford, unlike other directors continued to do some of his finest work after the nineteen thirties. Nevertheless, he shaped his art into personal and full expression during those precedent-setting years. (Pg.200)
Theo and the young Narrator similarly discover the revelatory capacity of art through a single pivotal painting and author respectively, both which become significant motifs in either text. Tartt utilizes an existent painting ‘The Goldfinch’ as a fixed point of reference, which, for both Theo and the reader provides a sense of reality and constancy ‘rais[ing him] above the surface’ of an otherwise tumultuous childhood. Whereas Proust uses a fictional author, ‘Bergotte’, to communicate the universality of art, and invite the reader, through the vivid immediacy with which the Narrator’s early reading experiences are described, to participate in his epiphanic discovery that art can translate ‘imperceptible truths which would never have [otherwise] been revealed to us’ (97). Artistic imagery becomes a motif in Proust’s descriptions of scenes of domesticity and nature. In a scene recounting Francoise ‘masterful’ preparation of a family meal the Narrator describes asparagus in the technical language of painting as ‘finely stippled’ provoking an association between his observations of asparagus and the creation of a painting. By forming this improbable link he elevates unremarkable asparagus to the ‘precious’ status of art in the eyes of the reader. Proust’s presentation of his Narrator’s ‘fascination’ and pleasure at their ‘rainbow-loveliness’, forces the reader to consider asparagus with unfamiliar and attentive appreciation, conveying the idea that art can uncover the overlooked beauty of the mundane. Though Theo reveals a far more cynical view of ordinary life as a ‘sinkhole of hospital beds, coffins and broken hearts’ Tartt conveys the similar belief in art’s capacity to create a ‘rainbow-edge’ of beauty between our perceptions and the harshness of reality. In the most
On one side of the conflict, Americans have a passionate relationship with nature. Nature acts as a muse for artists of every medium. While studying nature, Jo...
The Exhumation of the Mastodon by Charles Willson Peale juxtaposes nature with scientific innovation as well as with individualism. Peale painted himself and his family into the painting as to emphasize their role in the discovery of the bones of the mammoth and celebrate their status and wealth. This painting intertwines romantic themes of innovation, with transcendentalist themes of individualism, and the relationship of science and nature through the pulley system with the horizon of nature in the
Hogu, Barbara Jones. “The History, Philosophy and Aesthetics of AFRI-COBRA.” AFRI-COBRA III, n.p. Amherst, Mass.: University Art Gallery, University of Massachusetts at Amherst, 1973.
Born July 30, 1863 in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford was the first child of William and Mary Ford. As a young man he became an excellent self-taught mechanic and machinist. At age 16 he left the farm and went to nearby Detroit, a city that was becoming an industrial giant. There he worked as an apprentice at a machine shop, while months later he would begin work with steam engines at the Detroit Dry Dock Co., where he first saw the internal combustion engine, the kind of engine he would later use to make his automobiles.