Walton ford pancha tantra6/5/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Includes an in-depth exploration of Walton Ford’s oeuvre, a complete biography, and excerpts from his textual inspirations: Vietnamese folktales and the letters of Benjamin Franklin, the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and Audubon’s Ornithological Biography. The book’s title derives from The Pancha Tantra, an ancient Indian book of animal tales considered the precursor to Aesop’s Fables. The beasts and birds populating this contemporary artist’s life-size paintings are never mere objects, but dynamic actors in allegorical struggles : a wild turkey crushes a small parrot in its claw a troupe of monkeys wreak havoc on a formal dinner table, an American buffalo is surrounded by bloodied white wolves. ![]() But a closer look reveals a complex and disturbingly anthropomorphic universe, full of symbols, sly jokes, and allusions to the ’operatic’ nature of traditional natural history themes. The individual plates that tell the stories within the overarching tale that is the artist's passionate decades-long preoccupation are also the large-scale gouache & watercolor paintings that have made Ford very wealthy, scattered as they now are across the globe, to find their place. ![]() Taschen, 2009, First edition, 320 pp., 11 1/4" X 15", Hardcoverįantastic menagerie: The sinister majesty of Walton Ford's wildlife At first glance, Walton Ford ’s large-scale, highly-detailed watercolors of animals may recall the prints of 19th century illustrators John James Audubon and Edward Lear, and others of the colonial era. This is the third revised & heavily expanded version of Walton Ford's ongoing Magnum Opus, 'Pancha Tantra'. ![]()
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