Practically every hiker on the Long Trail in Vermont—the nation's first walking trail—carries at least one heavy item that he cannot do without. The 270-mile trail, which follows the Green Mountains along the high ridge from the Massachusetts to the Canadian border, is rocky and spare, and the trail is cut not like the broad mule-path avenues of the Pacific Crest but Yankee style, following stream beds no wider than this page and going straight up boulders and over craggy roots with rough directness. You can't walk too far before you see the absurdity of taking more than what's absolutely necessary—food and water, clothes and rain gear, tent and sleeping bag. But everybody you meet on the trail takes something. On a typical weeklong hike in June, the evolutionary ecologist from Wake Forest packs jars to collect beetles; the summer trail worker carries a collection of field guides; and the painter Walton Ford brings the diary of the sixteenth-century Italian sculptor and rogue Benvenuto Cellini, a Bialetti coffeemaker, and single-malt scotch in an unbreakable plastic bottle. "Make a bulldog hug a hound," Ford said, passing the bottle to me after one long day's hike.
Ford has an easy, reprobate charm that fits nicely with his roguish good looks. He's such a wild storyteller—over coffee or drinks; hunting through the mess of books on the floor of his studio; racing up and down mountains; running into you in a Berkshires parking lot with his wife, Julie Jones Ford, and his grade school children, Lillian and Camellia—that you forget he's not a performer but a painter. Strictly speaking, he's a watercolorist of animal scenes done on a grand scale and in a nineteenth-century manner. The accomplishments of his works are startlingly old-fashioned: His draftsmanship has Dürer's woodcut muscularity, and his ambitious compositions have the sweep of Delacroix or Géricault. The overall effect is ravishing in a way that has, for much of his career, worked against his reputation. For at least the past 60 years, the art world has dismissed depictions of nature, with a judgment so reflexive (all you have to say is "not cool") that the sly and wicked side of Ford's scenes—the raucous satire and skewed allegories that plunge us into the dark side of nature, sex, and violence—have been lost to wider appreciation.
"He's a quiet comer," says Marilyn Kushner, who is curating Ford's mid-career retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. "He doesn't play the game very much. He's laid-back. But I've talked with people in the field, some of whom have not heard of his work. And the minute they see it, they immediately recognize how great it is. With the quality of the work, it's surprising that he's stayed so quiet for so long."
The laid-back label fits only professionally. Face to face, or 20 yards up the trail, Ford talks. Ford in conversation is a force of nature. The animals in his works often allude to human qualities or even to actual people: A Cuban red macaw perching near a Caribbean landscape in flames is Fidel Castro; a belted kingfisher by the River Ganges is Bill Gates. The European starling that so often swoops into his pictures is both a self-portrait and an all-purpose symbol of Western culture ("It's nasty and intrusive," Ford says. "It takes over nests"). Invariably, he paints the scruffy bird with its beak wide open.
