Walton Ford by:Heidi G.

Walton Ford was born in Larchmont, New York in 1960. Ford graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with intentions of becoming a filmmaker. As Ford experimented with Watercolor he realized his talent with telling stories through his most times very large scale works.

Ford with an interest in political commentary and natural history finds a way to combine the two in his work. Ford likes to confront the continuing forms of oppression that still exist in todays society and how it effects the social and environmental landscape of our contry.

Ford has a huge interest in natural history and an interest in painting animals. He paints the animals with very realistic detail but always hides things in his paintings such as jokes, clues and erudite lessons in colonial literature and folk tales. In one of his paintings Ford depicts a scene where a bunch of baboons are furociousely eating at a dinner table. With immense detail you can see every hair on the baboons but also get a sense of the humor within the artist.

Ford has a great interest in the explorations of John James Audobon. Some of Ford's naturalistic paintings depict in many ways that of Audobon's naturalistic paintings. This sh0ws how Ford can paint realistically but at some points add in a twist of humor to his work.

Ford is still working today in upstate New York where he resides with his family.

(The information I found is on the website http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/ford/index.html and from the Art 21 documentary on Walton Ford.

Oliver Herring by:Heidi Guthmiller

Oliver Herring was born in 1964 in Heidelberg, Germany. Herring received his BFA from the University of Oxford in Oxford, England. Herring then went on to receive his MFA from Hunter College in New York. Herring now resides and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Some of Herring's early works pay tribute to his close friend Ethyl Eichelberger, a drag performance artist who commited suicide in 1991. The ethereal sculptures he produced bring forth introspection, memory and mortality. The woven sculptures were created by knitting together pieces of Mylar into clothing, furniture and human figures.
After his sculpture pieces Herring moved on to making stop and go action videos. The materials he uses for his sets are recylced from one piece to the next. Herring's videos are very dreamlike and make you wonder if you are in the conscious world or the unconscious. The ending of his videos are always unpredictable and unexpected and always keeping the observer wondering what is next.
Herring's most recent work is that of making human like and life sized sculptures. He photgraphs a real life model from every possible angle over and over, he then takes the photo's and cuts them up and attaches them to the base of his sculpture; which is always in the same pose as the real life posed model. The cut pieces of the photographs becomes the sculpture. From a distance the human like sculptures look very real but as you get closer you can see all the seperate pieces that make up the sculpture as a whole.
Oliver Herring is a young artist with a considerable amount of need to experiment with many different mediums. From photography to sculpture to movie making this artist will be producing great works in the years to come.

(All the information is from http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/herring/index.html and information I recieved from watching the Art 21 documentary on Herring.