A Philosophical Take on Zoology in Walton Ford’s Wry Paintings

Ah, beauty. It’s finally back in the art world’s good graces--but only under certain conditions. It’s no longer enough just to seduce the senses. To be taken seriously these days, beautiful art must also, somehow, abrade the conscience. Seduction is great, but argument--aesthetic, political, historical, philosophical--stirs the soul today like no amount of mellifluous pigment.

Walton Ford’s recent watercolors fill the bill brilliantly, satisfying on counts of both brains and beauty. Ford, who lives in New York state, paints with a 19th century sense of grand style and thinks with all the self-scrutiny of one born into our own troubled century. The paintings, on view concurrently at the University Art Museum at Cal State Long Beach and Kohn Turner Gallery, in the artist’s first solo shows in California, are both stunningly beautiful and scathingly smart.

In his work, Ford engages in a time-lapse conversation with John James Audubon (1785-1851), whose bird and animal studies were considered remarkably vivid and natural in their day. In fact, Audubon typically killed his subjects before posing them (often in highly contorted positions). This top-of-the-food-chain behavior has parallels in European and North American attitudes toward foreign cultures. All of Ford’s work here stems from his own unease in identifying with those who translate their economic or military dominance into a sense of entitlement that allows them to destroy the unfamiliar in order to take command of it.

In each painting, Ford, who works from a combination of photographs, sketches, models and natural history museum specimens, brings together species that are geographically incompatible, and their mode of interaction becomes a metaphor for the confrontation and collision of unlike cultures. In keeping with Audubon’s practice, Ford identifies each of the creatures he depicts through numbered captions, and in the same deliberately old-fashioned script, he pencils in “field notes”--quotes and clippings that help forge the metaphoric link.

In two paintings at the university museum, European starlings--an aggressive, opportunistic species that Ford likens to Anglo-Saxon culture in general--stand in as tourists. “Sights” has them ogling natives in conflict, represented by an Indian-crested hawk-eagle eviscerating a rose-ringed parakeet. In “Na raamro,” the starlings beleaguer a Himalayan bearded vulture by pecking on its wing and teetering on its head. Next to the work’s title, Ford has written in a short glossary of stereotypical tourist phrases steeped in cultural condescension, such as “The food is cold,” “Where is the porter?” and “I have diarrhea.”

Several of the paintings are quite specific in their references. One (also at Long Beach) responds to Microsoft chief Bill Gates’ visit to India in 1997, when Ford and his family were spending an extended time there. It shows “Baba B.G.” as a North American kingfisher holding court to eight other brilliantly plumed birds sitting lower down on the same branch. A large fish, skewered by the branch where it meets the trunk, hangs nearby, spilling smaller fish from its slit gut. Some of those tumbling from its belly are shown in the process of eating even smaller fish. Such is the law of economic imperialism.

Ford has a fabulist’s skill at narrative, and even includes fragments of fables in his work. In the spectacular “Hide Trade” (at Kohn Turner), Ford uses the stripes of a South African quagga (a cross between a zebra and a donkey) as the marks in a timeline of the animal’s own extinction. The animal’s demise at the hands of colonialist settlers echoes the fate of the Khoi people, natives of the Cape region. In a short, poignant fable written above the nearly life-size image of a quagga stumbling to the earth with a knife deep in its side, the moon tells a mantis that in dying, one still lives. The mantis tells a hare, who spreads the opposite, more blunt and brutal message, that in dying, one merely comes to a final end.

Ford has spectacular skill in conjuring up the real physical presence of these animals. From the jaguar’s sleek fur to the delicate pink softness inside a bull’s ear, the textures he renders are rich and convincing. As immediate and animate as the creatures appear, Ford forces a retrospective distance on them through the paper’s faux yellowing and foxing, and the handwritten text’s fading into the fibers. Like a finely tuned system of counterweights, the paintings balance between clever self-consciousness and unencumbered sensual reverie. They are clearly, solidly grounded in history, irony and cultural critique, but it is beauty that makes them fly.

* “Avatars: The Watercolors of Walton Ford” at the University Art Museum, Cal State Long Beach, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long Beach, (562) 985-5761, through March 26. “Walton Ford: New Work” at Kohn Turner Gallery, 454 N. Robertson Blvd., (310) 854-5400, through March 20.