hillbilly epicurean.

I don't "surf" much - normally when I look something up I have something in mind, either very specifically or generally.  There are a few sites that break that mold, of course, sites that I come back to daily or weekly because they're just darned interesting (e.g. BoingBoing, Neatorama, io9, and Uniwatch).  One of those, that may be a bit surprising, is the homepage of PBS.  Why do I like their page?  Well, its great for lunch - you know, articles that can be read in about ten, fifteen minutes and, of course, tons of fireworks for the ojos.  Recently I came across an interesting little feature on PBS that I felt was flat out cool enough to give it its very own, very special bookmark on my browser - specifically, it was the website for the television show Art: 21.  Now, I'll admit - I have never seen an episode (I wonder whether my local affiliate carries it and, perhaps more significantly, why I haven't bothered to look and see when it comes on my living room companion Ol' Brainmelter).  But the website is pretty nifty and has the added advantage of hitting me in the face with a lot of excellent artists who have never had a show in Wise, Virginia.  Geez.  Regardless, one of these artists in particular blew my mind - Mr. Walton Ford.  Ford can only be described as, and I mean this seriously, Audubon and Albrecht Dürer's intellectual love child - with figurative clues from Rodin.  I know.  It is insane.


 It is difficult to summarize Ford's work - it is a humanized, politicized variant on Audubon's work - faithful in detail and technique but departing in imagery radically - I truly feel as if he has taken the social scientist's vision of the world and translated it with watercolor and gouche into a journal of life and death and struggle.  It is powerful, like those most perfect Greek masterworks that portray the moment before one figure triumphs over another (I immediately think of The Death of Laocoon but there are many, many others that would fit the bill equally) or, alternatively, of the writhing human figures in Rodin's The Gates of Hell or Bosch's portrayals of the Inferno.