Biggest Artistic Inspiration:
When I was in grade school in the 60s 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 70s 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.
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 60s. 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 uncles 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 fathers 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.
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. 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 client such as Apple Computers, International Harvester, Continental Heritage Press and Tulsa Magazine, Friends Action Committee, Friends Evangelical Church Eastern Region, �O� Oprah Magazine, DCHeath both the 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.
I retired June of 2014.