ART CITIES:London-Walton Ford

Walton Ford is known for his monumental and extremely detailed watercolours depicting wild animals. Fuelled by his fascination with their relationship to man, Ford’s work elaborates on the tradition of natural history painting, whilst infusing it with historical facts and surreal imaginings. The artist interprets and transforms stories and images, drawing from history, literature, underground comic books, legends, myths, popular films, as well as visits to natural history museums, among other sources.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Max Hetzler Archive

For the exhibition “An Orbed Drop of Light”, Walton Ford presents a selection of paintings and accompanying studies which extend his career-long investigation into the relationship between humans, animals and the natural world. Several works form part of the artist’s new series of cinematic depictions of wolves, which explores the beauty, surrender and love that can be revealed in times of peril. “The viewer is unarmed in these watercolours, Ford reflects, “a witness of sublimity and silence”. Looming large over the viewer, the wolves are framed by dramatic, expansive skies inspired by the cloud architecture of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s ceiling frescoes.

As is typical of Ford’s oeuvre, many of the paintings incorporate literary allusions to writers and poets. Lending the exhibition its title, “An Orbed Drop of Light” (2026), quotes John Keats’ tender description of love in the epic poem, “Endymion”, whilst the endlessly unfolding sky in “Outward and outward and forever outward” (2026), draws on a line from Walt Whitman’s  evocative magnum opus, “Leaves of Grass”. In “Everliving Fire” (2026), Ford conjures Heraclitus’   metaphor of a perpetually surging and subsiding cosmos. Through attentiveness to minute, fleeting conditions of light and weather, or the intricacies of animal anatomy, Ford evokes the vastness of the natural world.

Elsewhere, Ford places beauty in dialogue with fraught legacies of human and animal encounters. In “Taughannock” (2026), a monumental passenger pigeon presides over a phantasmagoric tableau. This now-extinct species of wild, migrating pigeon once dominated the North American skies, their flocks numbering billions and taking several days to pass overhead, blotting out the sun and darkening the sky. Devastated by human deforestation and hunted unrestrainedly, the dove-like species declined rapidly and by the start of the twentieth century had vanished entirely.

In “Hudson River Reel” (2025) a bald eagle, a wild turkey and a turkey vulture perform a treetop ‘reel’. Wings outstretched, the three birds perch high above the Hudson River while the golden, rolling landscape evokes the Hudson River School painters. Ford playfully alludes to Benjamin Franklin’s proposal of the turkey as a more worthy national emblem than the bald eagle, stating ‘We have a raptor, a scavenger, and a game bird. You can’t have one bird; the eagle isn’t going to tell the whole story’.

Photo: Walton Ford, River Reel, 2025, watercolour, gouache and ink on paper, 152.4 x 292.1 cm.; 60 x 115 in., 162.5 x 299.7 x 6.3 cm.; 64 x 118 x 2 1/2 in. (framed), © Walton Ford, Courtesy the artist and : Galerie Max Hetzler

Info: Galerie Max Hetzler, First Floor, 41 Dover Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 14/9-11/11/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 11:00-18:00, www.maxhetzler.com/