Interview by Claudia Steinberg
Portrait by Charlie Rubin

Walton Ford was born to fancy but financially challenged, displaced Southerners, and grew up in an affluent New York suburb with neat lawns and golf courses. Fortunately, there were also lush woods, where he caught birds, snakes, frogs and other creatures to take home to his room. At the age of five he drew a circus scene with an acute sense of three-dimensionality; Ford’s father framed it, and at the time of this interview it hung in his Tribeca studio, where a grand, new tableau of a lion and a donkey in dangerous embrace sat on the easel, almost ready for display at the 2024 Venice Biennale. Concurrent with that exhibition – inspired by Tintoretto’s monumental painting of St Jerome and his faithful lion companion – Ford’s beloved and endangered beasts are also on show in Birds and Beasts of the Studio at Manhattan’s Morgan Library & Museum, in dialogue with the artist’s favourites from its large collection of animal drawings, ranging from Rubens and Delacroix to Merian. Ford’s scholarly and artistic interest in our fraught relationship with wild animals is also deeply emotional: telling the story behind one of his paintings – the violent abduction of a baby gorilla named Susie from Congo and her journey on a Zeppelin to America a century ago – moves him to tears.

Claudia Steinberg  Your show in Venice is called Lion of God, and it’s about the enviable friendship between St Jerome and his lion, the grateful beast. You reference a Tintoretto painting that depicts the pair. Their harmonious relationship is very rare and evokes paradise – the kind of peace between human beings and animals that we lost as part of God’s punishment. Don’t we still mourn it?

Walton Ford  These parables came to be for reasons; they are collective dreams we can interpret. So here you have St Jerome who is renouncing all material goods and going into the desert for prayer and meditation. Jerome, in that state, is confronted with an animal of tremendous destructive power that needs his help. He pulls the thorn out of the lion’s paw, and it becomes his devoted pet. The lion goes from the realm of wild animals into the realm of the domestic, which is something that wild animals don’t do. All domestic animals have made a decision to turn their will over to us to some degree. Farm animals have made an agreement with man and it works for the success of the species if not the individual life of a factory-farmed animal, which is not a good one, obviously. The idea that somehow we took these animals out of some natural state and turned them into our creatures is also a bit of a myth. There is an agreement, and the way you’ll know that is if you try to ride a zebra, it will try to kill you. You could take a wild animal like a lion or a tiger or a zebra and tame it to the degree where you can subjugate the individual, but its offspring will have to be tamed all over again. A domestic cat or dog or horse or sheep is already predisposed to enjoy human company because they made this decision as well. It’s a mutual thing. I’m very interested in the idea of human beings domesticating animals that don’t cooperate and have no interest in us at all. A lion doesn’t want to be the king of the beasts. He doesn’t want to be hunted, obviously, but he also doesn’t necessarily want to be followed around by Range Rovers full of tourists with cameras. I’m interested in this kind of stalking, this obsessive, compulsive relationship we have with animals like lions, where we won’t leave them alone. People say you have to go on a safari and see the mountain gorillas because there are only a few hundred left, but I’m afraid that I might be the one that brings them Covid-19 or some other disease. I want to leave those poor sons of bitches alone. I’m not interested in harassing the last 300 gorillas left on the volcanoes. What I love about St Jerome’s story is all the preparation that it takes for him to have the compassion to love an animal that could easily, with one paw, destroy him – and he achieves that through renouncing material goods, through living in a state of prayer and meditation and scholarship. In a way, it’s exactly the state of mind we need to be in to save our planet.

CS  To renunciate our materialism.

WF The way we live is not the way St Jerome was living. One of the greatest conservation issues we have with certain types of species that can prey upon human beings – like lions, tigers, sharks, crocodiles, polar bears – is that usually it involves asking people to tolerate the presence of animals that could kill their children on their way to school or devour the cattle that they need to survive. Westerners with lots of money are asking Indian people in the Gir Forest not to do anything about the Gir lion, because there are only a few hundred of them left in India. I am one of those people that wants them to be here. A world without big predators seems like a very sad place.

CS You have predicted that within the next 100 years, there won’t be any animal left that could eat a person.

WF The great natural history writer, David Quammen, told me that the last predator would probably be a leopard because they’re really widespread in India and Africa. They’re generalised predators; they can live in deserts and mountains and swamps, and adapt to any location. They can eat almost anything smaller than them, including people from time to time. So the last man standing will probably be a leopard. That aside, I was interested in exploring the visual language of the St Jerome mythology that came up in The Golden Legend, which is a medieval collection of stories about the saints. The St Jerome chapter includes not just the story of him pulling the thorn out of the lion’s paw but also stories about the monks who came to live with St Jerome. His followers had a donkey that carried firewood and when the lion became tame they used him to guard the donkey from predators and thieves. But one night, the lion fell asleep, and the donkey was stolen by thieves. The monks blamed the lion, accusing him of having eaten the donkey, and as punishment he now had to carry the firewood. They made him into a beast of burden. Then, the lion saw the thieves and donkey in the distance and he roared and chased the thieves away, and was reunited in great affection with the donkey. The monks all felt terrible and when the thieves saw what had happened they bowed before St Jerome and were baptised and became monks themselves. I took all of the Renaissance St Jerome imagery – the skulls, the books, the lion, the donkey – and put them together in a dreamlike way, without logic. The lion is loaded up with books instead of firewood but the books are smouldering and about to burst into flames. Maybe he’s having a vision like St Jerome – he’s looking up at the heavens. I’m riffing on a Tintoretto painting of an apparition, and in Venice my lion apparition painting will share the same wall back to back with that Tintoretto – you’ll be able to walk around and see the lion’s vision and then St Jerome’s vision.

CS The burning book is an image with many associations.

WF  The first thing I did was draw the lion with firewood on his back because I thought, how strange - that alone is such a strange image. Then I thought of medieval Syria, which would have been where they were, and looked up Middle Eastern beasts of burden and the kinds of packs and bridles they would have had. I realised you would need a chain around the neck of the lion, a metal chain, and I put firewood on his back and then I thought the firewood had to be on fire. I have no idea why. That’s the first dream-like image that came. I had already done a picture of the lion with a book in his mouth and both his mouth and the book are dripping with blood. Again, I didn’t know what it meant. But the more I looked at the image the more I realised that in a sense the lion’s enemy is human culture. The book is a great symbol for human culture, and it is bleeding like a living thing. The dream makes sense when you analyse it; I just look at the paintings after I’ve come up with them and try to figure them out. Maybe the books were ignited by the power of contempt that the lion has for them; maybe he will be consumed by the fire. The painting is ten feet by five feet. In the Tintoretto, the lion is just a little thing in the dark. The lion has his paws pierced, I thought of it as stigmata. His mouth is bloody, because though you might save this animal he might still overwhelm you. This is my idea of loving unconditionally. The people that I love, they hurt me – my daughters, my ex-wife, my new girlfriend. I get hurt; they get hurt.

CS What is the lion’s vision?

WF I thought the only choice was not to show it, because how would I know? This last painting shows the donkey and the lion reunited; The Golden Legend talks about the incredible joy that the lion and the donkey feel being reunited, that they had this tremendous relationship. My aim was to show something ambiguous – is this sexual? Is he about to eat the donkey? I may put a rope bridle around the donkey’s nose and have the rope in the lion’s mouth so he would be in control of the domestic animal, a kind of role reversal. But then, I might just leave it as it is, because I like that it almost seems he might kiss him.

CS The donkey is as delicate as an antelope. He or she is not like a typical sturdy little donkey but a fine creature, and the scene looks rather erotic to me.

WF What was happening at the time when I painted this was that I had been reunited with a girlfriend who I loved for 15 years. It didn’t work out; we live too far apart and we have different jobs. I realised it was a hopeless love. She’s not a donkey but rather a beautiful lioness. What I’m doing in Venice is just a very potent series of symbols. I feel like it speaks to the moment we’re in. It has a lot to do with the way we approach nature and how we could approach these huge intractable problems in the environment, from a place of renouncing material goods, prayer and meditation. You don’t necessarily have to do it through the Catholic tradition, but you have to give up something material and then perhaps, quote-unquote, make friends with the lion. It’s a big question.

CS The fact that humans have painted, drawn and sculpted animals with such affection, skill and frequency – from Persian miniatures to Delacroix paintings to the wonderful drawings of Shuvinai Ashoona – is one of the most endearing traits of our species. There’s so much admiration in art for animals.

WF The very first images recorded by human beings were of animals – the line of the bull. It’s the first impulse. My God, I’m so lucky it’s the thing that chose me, the thing that I have been doing since I was five. My first urge to make art was to do basically exactly what I do, only now I paint the animals life size. Many of the paintings in the caves are life-size. The feeling of creating the image of the animal as if it were in the room with you is a very powerful thing.

CS So the impulse to paint the animal is not to tame or have power over it?

WF We don’t know the facts behind something that happened 40,000 years ago; there’s no written record. Anyone who assumes, “Oh, they did this as a spell for the hunter to be successful or they’ll invoke the fertility goddess” – who told you that? There’s a great arrogance when contemporary people write about prehistory and claim that they have any idea what those images were about. They seem to have no problem with the idea that they can go to Africa now and hang around a certain tribal group that lives in a pre-industrial way and gain insights into prehistory – that is absolute nonsense. These are modern people who have nothing to do with the European cave artist of 40,000 years ago. The idea that you could extrapolate anything about the behaviour of a person who lived in Europe 40,000 years ago based on the Kalahari native is idiotic. Yet you can read paragraph after paragraph doing exactly that. .

CS Your paintings address the arrogance of human nature. Is that true for all cultures?

WF I think it probably is. There’s a lot of nonsense that is very much tied to a type of Western European racism, which claims that some people are completely in tune with the environment in every possible way. This ideology glorifies an Edenic idea of, let’s say, the people who came over on the land bridge and became Native American. New research shows that they probably slaughtered all the mega-fauna that was here – mammoths and sloths and camels and horses – so this idea that somehow these people were living in harmony with nature represents its own form of racism. It has never been shown to be true that somehow some people lived without impact on animals; they burned grasslands, for example, and they probably caused some extinctions. It’s more about not being able to look at life as a flow, as things passing. Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction (2014) explains that it is the one we’re bringing on ourselves. We’re the meteor that’s about to hit the planet. Evolution will continue, unbelievable life forms will come after us, and it’ll be beautiful. Three hundred million years from now, it will be a new Devonian age.

CS You carefully studied taxidermic animal specimens at the Natural History Museum, looked very carefully at their fur and the way the hair grows, which direction it turns. From that mortal stillness, how do you bring an animal to life?

WF It was a very common practice with the early natural history artists to go into the field and shoot a specimen and then pose it. That was how Audubon worked.

CS He also killed some birds for no reason.

WF Way more than he needed. He was a strange man, but there are many like him. But the idea of animating the dead that way was a very big part of the tradition of natural history in its early days. Part of the weirdness of early engravings in old natural history books has to do with artists working with dead specimens, posing them in a way that seems alive, spreading their wings a little with pins, and then drawing them as if they’re flying but it’s not how they move. I see it and actually enjoy this sort of pre-photographic eye and for many years, my work resembled the historical work a lot more. Now it has a more cinematic look to it and slightly more naturalistic lighting, but it still has the feel of a diorama and the natural history museum: the relationship between the animal and the background is similar. The way that my animals look alive is that I start with little rough sketches that can be very lively, very loose, full of gesture, and then I add the detail. If you don’t work from a very loose, expressive gestural drawing, not necessarily very accurate, the result will be stiff and artificial. If you’re Picasso or Matisse, you stop right there; you’ve got it already. Although many of Picasso’s beautiful etchings started out the other way, where he would do a very careful study of a bowl and then reduce it, reduce it, reduce it until he had the essential abstraction.

CS Tell me about your show at the Morgan Library & Museum. It’s called Birds and Beasts of the Studio, so we are neither in the wild, nor in the zoo.

WF It’s the great indoors. It is literary practice as much as anything. I’m interested in how animals are living in human imagination. I had the opportunity recently to be in a panel discussion with the great natural history writer Carl Safina who studies animals in the wild and writes about their personal lives – the private life of a beautiful little owl that he rescued as a fledgling. He raised her and then got her acclimated to the wild, then she found a mate and raised her family right within his home. He writes about it and understands that she is living a very complex love life. I speak about animals simply as they live in people’s imagination, not as they actually live in nature. To do that, I would have to be him and spend all my time with binoculars, but I spend all my time reading accounts of how we interact with these animals over centuries, how we write about them and either fetishise, glorify or hate them, or prey upon and eliminate them.

“ The very first images recorded by human beings were of animals – the line of the bull ”

CS At the Morgan, you are also referring to its tremendous art collection. Which works have you selected to accompany yours?

WF I have chosen more than 30 works from the collection. Many I have written about, and the wall labels will be my own words. I have been thinking about animals and how to represent them, what we are thinking when we make pictures of animals for 30 years. So I have a lot to say. I’m very happy that they gave me that chance because I think it takes a lot for scholars to step aside and let someone else do the talking. I know some things simply as an artist that a scholar would not necessarily know simply because I have painted them. I once talked with a scholar at a natural history museum about the painting of an animal, and I explained that the image was painted indoors because I could see a window reflected in its eyes. Had it been painted outdoors, there would have been a sunspot. They dismissed me, saying the shape was just a visual cliché. I said that I could picture the room based on what I saw in that animal’s eyeball.

CS You are very careful not to sentimentalise animals. You often paint their eyes the way old masters did. The impact of these soulful eyes looking at the viewer is particularly intense in the picture of a dressed-up gorilla named Susie, who is depicted aboard a Zeppelin. You also painted an ape on his deathbed. Can you talk about letting these powerful but subjugated animals keep their animal identity, while also displaying deep and familiar feelings?

WF  I usually finish the eyes last, and they bring the animal to life. I’ve done the eyes early in this one. Ad Reinhardt always made fun of figurative artists for having a bunch of cheap tricks at the ready, and to some degree it is true, but what’s great is that they’re magic tricks! Watching somebody do a really, really complicated and amazing magic trick is a thrilling thing. When a painted surface suddenly seems to come alive and feels like it could breathe or it could make a noise or it has a soul, it just seems like a miracle. I knew Susie’s story, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to be her on that Zeppelin and the fact that she lived to be 50 or 60 years old. She was one of the oldest gorillas in captivity when she died. She lived a relatively full life without any other gorillas around. She would ride a bicycle and get dressed and sit at a table and use silverware. So she entertained herself by learning all kinds of cognitive tricks to keep herself alive. There would be no reason to think that she didn’t also live a long time because she was getting something out of this. She probably fell in love with humans and felt a lot of affection. She was a survivor. Her parents were killed and she must have been kidnapped and then brought out of West Africa to Europe, put on a Zeppelin to America, then travelled by train to Cincinnati where she spent the rest of her life. Her journey was insane but somehow she didn’t refuse to eat and she lived through it all, because she was a very adaptable, very remarkable animal. I wanted to get at that and totally eliminate anthropomorphism. I love Beatrix Potter and Walt Disney, but this is the opposite. I tried to write as I imagined she would if she could have written: “Graf Zeppelin, August 1929. I no longer feel like biting. All the strangeness has made me feel very tired. The people here have flat faces the colour of tongues. They bark loudly and move quickly. They offer food to me, most of it’s soft and sweet. I am out of the rain almost always now, inside hard shelters. This shelter seems to be moving. I feel like I’m sitting on a high branch in the wind, being carried somehow. I remember the feeling of being carried. I remember that feeling of being carried through the warm rain on my mother’s back. My hands and feet gripping her warm, wet fur, rolling along, floating along the green wet world passing above and below. Now I am being carried along very high and far. The cool rain passes out there. But in here my fur is dry and these chattering people carry piles of fruit and watch me while I eat it.” And then I painted her. My text is trying to imagine her loss, because in 1927 they must have killed her mother and her father and all the adult apes and then taken the babies, because you can’t take the baby away without killing the adults around her. The most unexplainably beautiful thing about living on planet Earth is that we sort of all share this consciousness and it’s the only thing that’s real; everything else is fleeting, comes and goes and comes and goes. What remains is observing. One of the great Stoic philosophers said that we are a soul carrying a corpse. This intelligence carries the corpse along until it drops into being a corpse again. There’s no more religion that I need.

CS You have chosen paper as your medium, as opposed to canvas, emulating Audubon and other scientific nature documentarians. But this fragility of the material also creates an emotional tension between the monumentality of your format, the ferocity of the action, the power of animals, and the very delicate material.

WF That’s a very beautiful description of what I do. I love that during the Age of Exploration, around the 16th century, all the way to the 19th century, this European expansion involved bringing artists along to record natural history discoveries. What are the resources? What are the animal resources? What are the vegetable resources? They needed to have a portable medium, something lightweight and adaptable. You didn’t want to have to carry turpentine and linseed oil; you needed something that dried fast, and you had to be able to use the water around you. Every other medium for paint means carrying liquid, and you didn’t want to carry heavy liquid up a mountainside, so you brought a dry cake of pigment. This was a super-efficient way to get a full-colour image down on paper before there was photography. Most exploration was done under tremendously difficult circumstances that would have resembled what war correspondents encounter. Think crocodiles and rattlesnakes and people shooting arrows at you: an Aguirre, the Wrath of God-like atmosphere, and you’re there making art. Most artists work in bourgeois conditions, and even Delacroix painted all those lion hunts in his studio after spending three weeks or so in North Africa. He didn’t have anything to do with those conditions when he was making that work. Making this kind of work under those circumstances, there isn’t anything like it in all of our history.

CS You have said that animals – such a prominent subject in art from the very beginning –  have all but disappeared from art. Why now, when we should celebrate them more than ever?

WF When I was at art school making narrative paintings wasn’t encouraged at all. Professors had reached a sort of modernist end game where you get to someone like Robert Ryman, and from there you can’t really paint anymore. What was being celebrated was maybe someone like Robert Smithson as a way of referring to nature. Then suddenly, there were people like Cindy Sherman coming up and people started to want to tell stories in photography and you start thinking, what’s wrong with narrative? The most interesting thing then was David Lynch making Eraserhead (1977) – that’s more interesting than anything at the Museum of Modern Art. Nan Goldin was starting to tell stories. I just started doing that with my paintings, but people were associating animal pictures with Norman Rockwell. Animals were frozen in “natural history”. Or in National Geographic, or in a calendar that shows dolphins in support of the environmental movement. They were associated with some very bad art, bad illustration. What was great was how a graphic novelist like Art Spiegelman made Maus: whoa, all bets were off. There was no greater piece of art, and he hated institutional art. He criticized MoMA; he was repulsed by the contemporary art world, because he’s a guy who loves comic books. He would tell you to just deal with life. So he got the Pulitzer Prize, and suddenly you didn’t have to concern yourself with what the art world thought was cool. Kerry James Marshall just did a whole series about Audubon because there is reason to believe that Audubon was black; he was from Haiti, his father was a sea captain who got a Creole woman in Haiti pregnant. Kerry James Marshall was interested in how having the tiniest bit of black blood in you made you automatically black. So he painted all the birds as black silhouettes, even if they only had the tiniest black mark on them. He did a whole series of these blackbirds against Audubon-like backgrounds. So he was engaged in a project very similar to mine in that I also want to use the traditional natural history image to talk about something else. All of those boundaries are falling. The younger artists have no distinction between popular culture and high culture.

CS Talking about popular culture, from a different era, you became fascinated with Queen Califia, the heroine of a perhaps slightly trashy novel read enthusiastically by Hernán Cortés, who named California after her. You’ve mentioned a half-mountain lion, half-condor creature – did you invent this heraldic animal or was it part of New World culture?

WF This bad adventure novel was written in Spanish in the 16th century; it was kind of a bestseller and the conquistadors liked it. They named part of the Pacific coastline after the book’s Queen of the Black Amazons who rode on griffins and killed men. My idea was, what if all of this was true? This is the natural history of California so let’s try to see what it looked like. So I did a painting with Naomi Campbell posing as the warrior queen. Larry Gagosian was not comfortable showing it in LA – but she came to my opening, looking for it! People think I can’t paint people – I paint them just the same way I paint the animals. So my idea was that if the griffin which is half-lion, half-eagle had evolved in California, it would have been half-condor, half-mountain lion so I just made a New World version because two animal species can grow to have the same physicality, but not be related. Like fish and dolphins. It’s known as convergent evolution: the idea is that doing the same activity can shape the body to be the same.

“One of the great Stoic philosophers said that we are a soul carrying a corpse“

CS Apropos of California: the La Brea Tar Pit also inspired a kind of palaeolithic science-fiction vision of these ancient creatures rising from their deep, dark pond. It came to you in a hypnagogic hallucination, which occurs seconds before falling asleep or moments before waking. You have referred to this dreamlike state as a source of inspiration.

WF It’s very fickle, and you cannot really summon it. I trust in the method that Tom Waits recommends: “If you want to write a good song, you have to make a safe place for the song to land like a bird.” The way to do that is to go ahead and write a song. Because then there’s one and others will come and land there. It’s a safe place. I’m in a constant state of making art, and it really allows for more art to feel safe to land. On a recent flight I was thinking what my last painting for the show was going to be. I thought of all the elements that I liked about my St Jerome and I remembered that I hadn’t put in a skull, which is in every painting of St Jerome. I wanted to put the skull in the lion’s mouth, almost swallowing the skull, and the skull’s eyes are looking out of the lion’s mouth. Maybe he’s tipping the skull up towards the heavens to get another vision. I could really go for a Baroque chiaroscuro and have the light fall on the skull, illuminating it. That was it. I didn’t know what the fuck it was supposed to mean, but I quickly did some sketches of this image. I think it’s going to be the one I’ll make, since this is all about enlightenment or maybe a spiritual awakening or recognition that could happen in the presence of an animal like this. There’s a great Hindu story about a young woman who’s in love and going to get married; she lives in the forest and has all these errands to run before the wedding: going to the cake maker, the dressmaker and then the priests. Then she’s going to go have tea with her beloved and then the next day she’s going to get married. Everything is wonderful. So she leaves her house and steps into the forest, and there’s a hungry lion right in her path. In that moment, the cake maker is gone; the dressmaker is gone; the priest is gone; her fiancé is gone, and the lion’s breath is in her face. The gurus say, “Welcome the lion in your path.” All the bullshit is gone, you don’t need the cake, and for the first time she is actually who she is and knows the truth about herself. My exhibition is sort of about that awakening, like Jerome has in the face of the lion that allows him not to care about his own life so he can pull the thorn out. It comes from renunciation and from not being overly attached to people or to anything. The greatest gift is not being afraid to die. I’m thinking about all this stuff while I’m making the work.

CS As a final chapter, I was fascinated by your painting of an Asian elephant with beautiful birds sitting on him – even on his penis – as if he were an island, a whole ecosystem.

WF I saw these Asian elephants in India when I lived there for six months because my wife was on a fellowship. Inevitably, I thought about why Westerners go to India, so I painted all these European and North American birds all over the elephant. It’s our benign fascination with the subcontinent, our desire to get something out of it, be it ashram tourism, enlightenment, exotism, or wealth. I’m guilty of it, too. So some of the birds sit right on the pressure points that an elephant driver would apply to direct the elephant. There is this special stick and you touch here and there and the trained elephant knows what to do. Some of the birds were landing in those spots, trying to control the elephant. It’s a tactile vocabulary that you also apply to horses. I believe that this kind of subtext gives a certain richness to the image, because there’s a deliberateness behind my purpose that you don’t see but that infuses the work anyway. Like when you visit a professional kitchen with a really great chef; there’ll be so many steps, like, we use half beef stock and half vegetable stock and we reduce it by doing this and that... nobody who eats the food knows all that, but it doesn’t matter because it comes through in its richness. .