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Walter King Biography:
Biographical information for Walter King can be found below. The artist may choose what information to display. Sometimes the artist chooses not to display personal information to the general public.
Age
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60
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| Gender |
Male
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| Status |
Married
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| Children |
2
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| Religion |
Not enough room to discuss |
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| Education |
Graduate Degree |
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| Hobbies / Interests |
I write poetry. I sail lake Erie. I like long road trips especially out west. I've traveled Europe and parts of Argentina. Hire me to speak or exhibit and I'll go almost anywhere. |
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| Favorite Artistic Medium |
Painting Other
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| Favorite Arthistory Movement |
Abstract Art - (1910 - )
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| Favorite Visual Artist |
I have shelves full of art books
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| Favorite Work of Art |
Matisse's Studio Qay San Michel
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| Biggest Artistic Inspiration |
When I was in grade school in the 60's my mother used to do copies of landscape paintings at night while everyone else was watching TV. I often watched as she graphed up the landscape print or photo to a larger piece of pastel paper. Eventually she taught me how to graph up an image. It was my first drawing lesson.
Chris (a writer and a musician) and Kevin Boyle,(an artist) two friends who lived down the street were very influential to me. They were 2-3 years older than I, in high school when I was in junior high. They accepted me the first time we met and took me under their wings. Kevin became a photographer and video artist in the 70's and exhibited at Holly Solomon. Chris became a music industry writer, a press agent for the Doors, has the last interview with Peter Tosh before he was murdered and now teaches English in Laguna Beach and has just recorded his first CD. Chris and Kevin taught me about being creatively myself.
Nathaniel Larrabee my painting professor from the Columbus College of Art and Design taught me so much about painting and what it means to be an artist and greatly influenced my desire to teach. |
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| Why Did You Become An Artist |
I idolized my uncle Bob. He played football for the Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD from 1952 to 1956. He was a Naval Commander and an F-4 Phantom pilot in the early 60's. In 1964 he died in an attempt to land his F-4 on a carrier in the sea of Japan training pilots just before the Gulf of Tonken. Faulty cables on the carrier caused the accident.
After I got over my uncle's death and the assasination of JFK I began my art education. I asked my mother to teach me how to use her graphing system to do a portrait of JFK from Life magazine. I was probably 10. I did the first sketch on the back of one of my father's green office forms. Then I did a final version on a nice piece of charcoal paper. The green sketch sold to a neighbor down the block. The big final version on nice paper was exhibited in the school arts and science fair. A curator from the local Museum of the Great Plains in Lawton Oklahoma saw the piece and included it in a show of amateur artists in the museum. I was hooked. |
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| Your Personal Biography |
1981 Walter King earned his BFA from Columbus College of Art and Design in the field of Illustration with a strong emphasis in both advertising and fine arts. Within one year he had accomplished award winning designs for a PBS documentary called Profiles in American Art, a 12 part series that ran from 1982 until well into the 90’s I some parts of the country. He was included in the Hiroshima Appeals Peace Poster exhibition series in 1985. His Peace Poster design is collected along with hundreds of others in the Hiroshima Museum of Art. He worked for clients as both designer and/or illustrator such as Apple Computers, International Harvester, Continental Heritage Press, Friends Action Committee, Friends Evangelical Church Eastern Region, “O” Oprah Magazine, DCHeath Educational Publishing and Educational Software Divisions, Ford Glass of Tulsa Oklahoma.
By 1985 he had completed his MFA in Painting at Boston University and began teaching at his Alma Mater the Columbus College of Art and Design. While teaching color, design, drawing in the foundation division and various illustration courses in the Visual Communications division he slowly shifted his attention from advertising and illustration and began to follow more personal imagery in his private studio. These paintings, drawings and woodcuts have been exhibited around the United States, in South America and Eastern Europe. Most recently Mr. King exhibited 40 years of artwork from the year he graduated high school in 1970 including design, illustration, painting, printmaking, photography and sculpture through 2010.
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| Artist Statement |
In a way I'm starting over...
I wanted to make images. I liked making figures, representing objects, making space and distance and form, pattern and rhyme and rhythm and, well, things you can recognize. But I came to painting the art dialog in America was one that contrasted a generation who had pushed hard towards pure non-objective abstraction with an eye to seeing the result as a kind of symphonic musical equivalent against what eventually fell to just copying photographs to achieve what was to became a very stark mechanical reality... photo based realism... I wanted to create something else...something that could talk. I liked metaphor, I liked poetry. It isn’t that I didn’t like abstraction, that would be like saying I didn't like music. I did. But there are things non-objective abstraction can’t say...things it won’t talk about even as it is the substructure of everything we see. But while atomic structure is the basis of of all physical existence it really doesn't tell you much about the guy down the street. There are simply subjects on which it is mute due to scale perhaps or focus. So perhaps you can think of what I wanted to do is to put the words to the music. And perhaps a little dance as well. Ballet, Opera...that's a bit more like what I'm talking about. And the camera is just another art form unto itself. The idea of copying what it does just never settled for me. It would be like casting an opera to be sung and acted by the staff of the nightly news. But with recognizable images I could pile up possible meaning to the sky. And as I studied abstraction along the way and realized that all art is abstract the need to focus on abstraction as the end and the means just disappeared. Well it didn't really disappear completely...It became the spirit of the work that gave it energy. You could say it disappeared into the work itself as I was making. And as it did I was free to once again make pictures of things…images,…figures! I was free to follow the urge that people have followed for perhaps 10,000 years! To make images of the world I live in. Without having to apologize to the modern or now post modern academie. It is an authoritarian wall one must climb if you want the grants, the shows, to be in the collections served by the galleries...
I don’t really care about post modernism. No more than it cares about me. I don't really care for any -ism at all any longer. So some time ago I began just making pictures without regret. I began building an iconography of images that seemed meaningful to me on a variety of levels…more recently because of a medical impediment I have come to doing watercolors. While the impediment has limited my mobility and physical strength I am still able to see and to paint. At this time the things I am painting are landscapes primarily. From time to time I paint my friends, or perhaps a still life. But what has attracted me of late, perhaps because it is hard for me to get out into nature is nature itself. The land. The places I can or have visited. When I travel I paint from direct observation as often as I am able. But I continue after the fact from memory...and that memory may be purely from my mental picture of a place or as often as not enhanced either by previous paintings and sketches or from photos or a bit of both. Unlike the more metaphorical work of my past these are immediate. A sense of what I saw, what I felt letting you decipher what it means. These, at this juncture in time, are not so much ABOUT something as they are OF something. This is a way of working that I have not pursued as such since I was an art student. Perhaps it is because I feel I have cheated death and that to simply be here is now imperative. At this moment in time I'm not questioning the work so much as simply responding. Maybe in a period of time this will change again to something that begs you to wonder what it means. At the moment it simply means that God turned on the sun (or however you understand the sun to exist) and it shines through layers of atmosphere and it reflects off of water and ice and rock and sand and casts shadows through objects like trees and hills and grass and houses and these abstract shapes and colors and textural patterns of light and dark create the reality we all see together in our varying perceptions.
e-Book Catalog for Midwest Dialog available at Barnes and Noble for $6.99. See link below...
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Walter-King-Midwest-Dialog?store=ebook&keyword=Walter+King%3A+Midwest+Dialog
Walter King: Midwest Dialog (a 40 year retrospective is over but the POD catalog is available for $13.50 at the address below. I'm not taking any profit from the sale of these catalogs at this time to keep the price down. SEE THE ADDRESS BELOW:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/walter-king-midwest-dialog/12449100
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