Walton Ford imbues King Kong with strong emotions in current exhibition at Paul Kasmin Gallery (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
Paul Kasmin Gallery
293 Tenth Ave. at 27th St.
Tuesday – Saturday through December 23, free, 10:00 am – 6:00 pm
212-563-4474
www.paulkasmingallery.com
When King Kong is brought to New York City and put onstage in the original 1933 film, Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) says to Jack Driscoll (Bruce Cabot), “I don’t like to look at him, Jack. It makes me think of that awful day on the island.” Walton Ford uses that line as a jumping-off point, as well as the title, for his latest exhibition, continuing at Paul Kasmin Gallery through December 23. In the first room of the 293 Tenth Ave. space, a trio of large-scale watercolors breathes powerful emotion into the beast, as he goes from worried (“I don’t like to look at him, Jack”) to angry (“It makes me think of that awful day”) to sad (“On the Island”). Measuring nine feet high and twelve feet wide, the three works focus in on King Kong’s expressive face, presenting him with humanist qualities that dominate the room. “These paintings are about Kong’s heartbreak,” Ford explains in the press release. “I wanted to reveal the monster’s grief, his enormous sadness, the sorrow that the original Kong kept hidden from view.” In the back gallery, Ford references an excerpt from John James Audubon’s memoirs, in which the ornithologist relates a dark tale of having witnessed one of his mother’s monkeys kill “Pretty Polly,” to create six natural-history-style paintings that detail smaller monkeys terrorizing beautiful parrots, including “Unnatural Composure,” in which a bird’s head has just been ripped off and held out to be admired. “The sensations of my infant heart at this cruel sight were agony to me,” Audubon writes. Thus, Ford, who was born in Larchmont and lives and works in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, has infused the paintings of Kong, a fictional character, with deep emotion, while the smaller watercolors of the monkeys and birds, inspired by actual events, are much colder, as if taken from a textbook, and they require extra attention to pick up on some of their more gruesome aspects, free of “enormous sadness.”