Dallas Morning News
April 18, 2002
by Charles Dee Mitchell

...David Ford concentrates on preparation for his multipaneled, mural-sized graphite drawing. Mr. Ford suspends various pencils and sticks of graphite from the top of his truck, weighting them down with water-filled plastic bottles. He tapes paper to the truck bed and then goes for a drive. Gravity, motion and time do the rest. In this instance, the drive was from his home in El Paso to the DCCA. The result is a complex and engaging abstraction that varies from passages of elegant tracery to dense areas that eat into the paper. Mr. Ford adapts the modernist interest in chance to a contemporary usage that also seems particularly American in its emphasis on the highway and vastness of the country...

Dallas Observer
May 16-22, 2002
by Christine Biederman

...Across the way, Dave Ford's "drawings" are unabashedly gimmicky, yet oddly compelling. His contribution, titled "Truck Drawing: El Paso to Dallas, 4/4/02 - 4/5/02," is a series of graphite on paper pieces made by suspending pencils in bottles over sheets of paper and driving, allowing the bumps and turns and motion of the road to record random marks.

Wall text suggests that in so doing Ford has "reinterpreted Jackson Pollack's action painting," but the results are more akin to aesthetic experiments such as Walter de Maria's "Lightning Field" in that they record mostly natural phenomena, not aesthetic decision making.

The resulting marks are made in all directions, in all patterns, as haphazardly as the strokes in Monet's lily pads, but with the critical difference that this effect is not the result of the human mind, and there is no artfulness in Ford's art. Thus Ford's creations remind one of not-terribly-insightful social or artistic commentary, mildly interesting but ultimately empty...