Walton Ford's monumental paintings expand the visual language and narrative scope of traditional natural history painting, meditating on the often violent and bizarre moments at the intersection of human culture and the natural world. Although human figures rarely appear in his paintings, their presence is always implied.
Ford's work is included in a number of private and public collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. A survey of Ford's work was organized by the Brooklyn Museum in New York in 2006 and traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art in Texas and the Norton Museum of Art in Florida in 2007. In 2010-2011, Ford's midcareer retrospective traveled from the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum Fur Gegenwart in Berlin, to the Albertina in Vienna and to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Taschen books has issued three editions of his large-format monograph, Pancha Tantra