In an eight-page profile in this week’s New Yorker (January 26, 2009), painter Walton Ford [RISD ‘82 Film/Animation/Video] says that once he came to RISD, he discovered that the things he could do “were valued! I went from being fairly invisible in high school to being a star. And I knew I was going to be OK then.”

Walton’s hunch proved to be right. That first year at RISD he fell in love with painter Julie Jones [RISD ‘82 Painting], who still shares a studio with him in Great Barrington, MA, and since then he’s gone on to make a life as an artist - painting huge narrative watercolors that are inspired by natural history, shown at the best galleries and museums, and sold for six figures. In The New Yorker piece, Calvin Tomkins notes that Ford’s “technical facility is dazzling” and that “no one else, to my knowledge, has ever done watercolors of this size and ambition.” Still, Walton himself says that even though “I’ve never been better at what I do, I’m not pushing the language of making pictures in any new direction.” In other words, he says, he’s not quite “there yet.”