"...It made sense for me—since I was sort of aping
all these modes of representation—that I would end
up making prints that resembled natural history prints that
we’re used to seeing..."
"The sacred and the profane are locked in battle in
this image. But they can’t get away from each other—there’s
an attraction and a repulsion."
"I use a source that comes from the period that suits
the natural history image...and I try to bring it up to
date and think about how it affects the way we think today
and how similar the 19th Century is to now. That moment
of empire is almost the same."
"...It was very important to me to make them look like
Audubons, to make them look like they were a hundred years
old. Like he painted them, but that they escaped out of
him."
"...I realized I was making something that nobody had
ever made before. And that’s always a nice place to
be as an artist, even when you’re working in such a
traditional way."
While the majority of your work
is in watercolor, you've also recently been making prints.
Can you talk a little about that project?
FORD:
The whole print project is the
natural fruition of all the other stuff that I do. Early naturalists
like Audubon or Edward Lear (a great natural history artist)
or John Gould (who made all these prints in England of birds
from around the world) made prints. You can go to old bookshops
and see all the preparatory work that went into making folios
of natural history prints. All those things started out as
watercolors that were done in the field or done from nature.
And they ended up as prints that were bound and sold by subscription
to mostly English people who had cabinets of curiosities or
natural history collections of their own.
So it made sense for me—since I was sort of aping all
these modes of representation—that I would end up making
prints that resembled natural history prints that we’re
used to seeing, that Audubon had done or something. The first
project that I started working on was sort of the same size
and format as the Audubon prints. And they’re all birds
from around the world, but then I’ve injected all my
insane subject matter into that. So it just made sense when
I talked to David Kiel (he’s the curator of prints at
the Whitney Museum) and he said, "I’ve been waiting
for years to hear this." He’d been watching my work
and he thought of course I had to make prints. That was cool
to hear. He’s quite knowledgeable about the history of
printmaking. And it just makes total sense; it would almost
make no sense not to make them. And it makes sense to make
them the way that Peter and I make them, because the process
he uses and the press he has is probably a hundred and fifty
years old. All the techniques that he’s amassed, they’re
old...Rembrandt used them.
ART:21:
Can you describe the process?
FORD:
Yeah. So what you do with this
process basically is the end result—what you’re
trying to do—is make a mark on a copper plate. And the
copper plates are polished like a mirror. They’re very
very smooth. And after you make a mark on them, Peter puts
ink on the copper and then wipes it clean with the side of
his hand. The ink stays in the mark, whatever kind of mark
you make. We use various means to make the marks. We can scratch
the plate directly with a sharp instrument and it will hold
the ink and that’s called dry point. There’s a bunch
of different techniques, but essentially they involve making
lines in the print or making tone on the print. And the way
you make tone is with acid. There has to be direct contact
with the acid and the copper plate. Essentially, acid bites
into the plate and leaves a tone. And you control that in
various ways. I can paint the acid on. We can mask out areas
and then dip the entire plate in acid and leave it for a certain
amount of time and then take it out and repeat the process
again and again until we get increasingly dark tones. When
it comes to wiping the plate, he can mix the ink more strongly
or weakly and mix mediums into it and control the color that
way. And eventually, it seems we’ve always ended up with
six plates. Each one a different color. Or sometimes more
than one color on each plate. So that there can be up to nine
colors. And successively, we run these plates through the
press on the same sheet of paper. They all add up and mix
with each other to a full color image. It’s a color separation
process, which is similar to what they use in modern printing
when they print a color photograph or something like that
in the newspaper. But it’s all done by hand. There’s
no photographic means involved. Everything is done the way
it would have been done pre-photography, you know.
ART:21:
What's the story behind the print
we've filmed you making?
FORD:
The print is called "Compromised."
It shows two ibises, which are wading birds. One of them is
called the sacred ibis and it lives along the Nile, or it
used to. And then there’s one called a glossy ibis which
is a bird that lives in Europe and America. So they’re
entwined with each other, locked in an embrace, which is partly
sexual and partly combative. They seem like they’re having
sex and also fighting. And they’re in an Egyptian landscape.
So the glossy and the sacred are fighting. The sacred and
the profane are locked in battle in this image. But they can’t
get away from each other—there’s an attraction and
a repulsion.
There’s this guy, Anthony Alexander Kingslake, who wrote
a book called "Eothen" which is about his travels
in Egypt. And he talks about crossing into the Ottoman empire
and suddenly becoming compromised—which meant that
you were in contact with people that were carrying the plague.
And you were in quarantine the minute you entered the Ottoman
Empire. And so before you did it, you had to make all your
preparations or else you would be stuck in quarantine for
fourteen days. If you’d left one thing behind you’d
have to wait fourteen days to go back. So it was like this
way of leaving Christendom, as he put it, and entering the
Ottoman Empire was compromising yourself, compromising your
own health.
And I felt it was just like John Ashcroft and the rest of
those guys—it seemed like what’s going on in the
U.S. today. There’s this idea that either you’re
for us or against us. Either you’re compromised or you’re
not. Either you’re infected or you’re not. There’s
no room for middle ground now. It’s like getting the
plague—you can’t have sympathy. You can’t try
to understand the other side’s point of view at all,
otherwise you’re compromised. "You will be carefully
shot and carelessly buried if you break the rules of quarantine"—that
was what Anthony Alexander Kingslake wrote about crossing
those lines of contamination back then. And it increasingly
feels like that would happen now with the new plague, which
is just basically our complete terror and fear of what we
don’t understand.
ART:21:
The work acts as political commentary?
FORD:
Yes, based on some 19th Century
colonial piece of writing that ties the whole together. That's
the way that I use a natural history image. I use a source
that comes from the period that suits the natural history
image, like this Kingslake book called "Eothen,"
which is a beautiful book. And I try to bring it up to date
and think about how it affects the way we think today and
how similar the 19th Century is to now. That moment of empire
is almost the same. That moment of fear and first contact
and misunderstanding and misapprehension is exactly what we’re
going through right now. And we haven’t seemed to figure
anything more or less out since then. You still feel like
you would be "carefully shot and carelessly buried"
if you made the wrong move.
It just felt applicable, you know. Sometimes the text seems
to fit the image and you get it all at once. Some of these
images, like "Compromised," that seem the most evocative
were started even before 9/11—that’s the weird thing.
It was stuff I was already thinking about.
ART:21:
Are explorers always negative
figures in your work?
FORD:
Well except for Mary Kingsley.
Oh man!
ART:21:
What about Mary Kingsley?
FORD:
Mary Kingsley...I haven’t
made any art about her yet because I’m just reading her
stuff now. She was a Victorian woman. There won’t be
any art to back it up but it’s one of the greatest stories.
She took care of her parents until she was thirty years old.
And was brilliant. She taught herself Latin and astronomy
and geology and she read every book in her father’s library.
Yet she was a charwoman, essentially. She changed bedpans
for her sick mother her whole life. And spoke ‘enry ‘iggins.
She couldn’t pronounce her h’s, even though she
could speak Latin and Greek—amazing!
And when her parents died, they left her a small fortune and
she had all this time on her hands and went to Africa. She
went to West Africa and she went places that no white person
had ever been. And she studied what she called 'fetish.' She
studied African religion with real compassion and with an
attempt to understand. With very little judgment based on
the time. She was product of the colonial thing and felt that
the white man could be an agent for good in those regions.
But still, she really kept her eyes open. She’s a really
interesting woman. She discovered a whole bunch of fish that
had never been discovered, and plants, things like that, and
also wrote down a lot about West African religion. And she
spoke out against King Leopold and died in South Africa nursing
Boer prisoners of war, or something like that.
ART:21:
What makes her so noteworthy?
FORD:
Well her and Richard Burton
are among the only two people I’ve read about in that
period of time that actually took the trouble to learn about
the cultures
they were taking over or subjugating or whatever. She had
no agenda at all. She wasn’t there as part of the government
or anything. So she just went because she was curious, because
she was slightly suicidal. Actually, she was unmarried and
unhappy and so brilliant and so frustrated that she threw
herself into the most dangerous part on the map she could
find. Almost like, "I don’t care if I ever come
home, I have nothing really to live for." So she went
and when she came back she wrote it all down. An incredible
prose stylist, funny as hell. And she ended up with a best-seller
and was celebrated on the lecture circuit. But she was criticized
for her way of speaking and she said she was concentrating
so hard on trying to pronounce her h’s during her lectures
that she would ignore syntax. You know, I mean, she was an
amazing woman.
ART:21:
So she might end up in your work
some day?
FORD:
Oh, I’ve got to make art
about her. There’s just already so many stories! I’m
just reading her stuff now. So I’ve got to figure it
out, but I can’t wait to make some pictures about her.
She’s going to be kind of a major one I think.
ART:21:
Can you talk a little about your
use of watercolor? It's such a specific medium?
FORD:
Part of the reason I got interested
in using watercolor is that I was interested in painting things
that looked like Audubons. They were like fake Audubons, but
I twisted the subject matter a bit and got inside his head
and tried to paint as if it was really his tortured soul portrayed,
as if his hand betrayed him and he painted what he didn’t
want to expose about himself. And it was very important to
me to make them look like Audubons, to make them look like
they were a hundred years old. Like he painted them, but that
they escaped out of him. Almost like "A Picture of Dorian
Gray," but a natural history image.
And once I was sort of finished with that I realized that
I sort of did those for my own amusement and I was doing bigger
oil paintings. I was doing constructions at that time. I was
doing all kinds of stuff, trying to find my way. You go through
these periods in your artistic evolution where you’re
trying a bunch of different things out. And that was just
one of the things I was trying out at that time. And I felt
like it was more successful than most of the other things
I attempted to do, partly because I had all these years of
drawing, since I was a little kid. So they were more convincing
right off the bat.
The other aspect I realized is that Audubon painted birds
life-size. The birds were quite small and the largest image
he’d have to paint would be thirty by forty inches or
something like that. But I realized if I was going to paint
something like a tiger and I painted it life-size, if I painted
it in that mode, it would suddenly become an object that hadn’t
existed before. These things were done on the fly, in the
field. You’d shoot a specimen, if you were Audubon or
somebody, and you’d lay it out and draw it and water
color it and put it in a folio and save it for later when
you published a book about the flora and fauna of wherever
you were. So for me, to suddenly make an elephant life-size
or a tiger life-size, to make it in the mode of the notebook
style, and to imply that it was done from a dead specimen
or done from life in the field, was just this odd conceptual object
to make. It didn’t make any sense anymore. It’s
starts to break down as a logical thing. And it began to get
very exciting because I realized I was making something that
nobody had ever made before. And that’s always a nice
place to be as an artist, even when you’re working in
such a traditional way.
