http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/life_and_entertainment/2010/08/29/different-styles-coexist-in-retrospective.html
Different styles coexist in retrospective
Life
By Amy Davis
For The Columbus Dispatch Sunday August 29, 2010 8:25 AM
A retrospective of more than 220 works spanning more than 40years spotlights central Ohio artist Walter King at the Shot Tower Gallery.
The professor at the Columbus College of Art & Design proclaims his belief in education.
"There's a trend in the art world to say that to be educated as an artist is to be tainted," he says. "I disagree with that. All artists are self-taught, and all artists receive some education."
King describes the exhibit, curated by Teresa Weidenbusch, as part of "the history of art in Columbus of the last 25 years." Fine art and graphic works are included.
He recalls that, early in his career: "If you were a fine artist and you had to do some graphic art, you didn't tell anyone about it. And if you were a graphic artist, you'd never get a show."
He is pleased that the two merge in his show.
That merging becomes more evident in recent pieces, in which the two styles converge in single works. In Silent Run, King uses a clear, bold graphic style akin to that in his commercial pieces. Bold color blocks, nuanced by variations in the shades, produce the image of sky, water and a sailboat.
In contrast, Young Pantheists in Love, a triptych from 1993, is more conceptual. The first panel shows a man and woman in midkiss. The third panel shows the man swimming through a sea of fish. The middle panel is composed of painted plastic figurines. A mass of toy soldiers pushes up from the bottom, while the top portion is composed of animals. The piece is rife with imagery and symbolism.
Darfur (2007) is also rich in imagery. A woman in silhouette stands in the foreground, surrounded by a white haze amid a backdrop of orange sky and brown earth. The sky is filled with blue clouds, in the shape of reclining humans.
The expansive exhibit is even more impressive given the health problems that King encountered this summer.
A virus left him temporarily paralyzed, and, although he is expected to make a full recovery, his mobility is still limited.
"What should've taken two weeks took over a month," he says of arranging and hanging the show. "I've had a lot of help from a lot of volunteers."
The exhibit offers a portrait of King and a timeline of his life and work. Yet it is not conclusive, instead leaving plenty of room for King to continue to evolve as an artist.
Complex...brooding, opulent colors, somber tonality, flawlessly executed, King's spirituality is...subterranean. He gives us only what we are willing to seek. King presents us with an imagined world...they are the womb, they are the palm of God's hand, they are an ideal reality were time and temporal concerns slow down so that we might taste and feel and be and wonder. Many of the works have the feel of being underwater. The senses are bathed in amniotic fluid. Colors are ripe, luscious. King gives us the great love he bears.
-Leslie Constable,
The Columbus Dispatch
King's paintings address the dearth of spirituality in contemporary human affairs...he posits that painting can make a difference.
-Ann Cunningham
The Indianapolis Star
King’s paintings are deeply tranquil — just the right balm for a world in which what comes next often isn’t known.
-Bill Mayr
The Columbus Dispatch
It is best to describe King's work as spiritual. He uses religious, almost biblical imagery in many of the works, but King's purpose seems to be to move beyond the images- the literalness of religion to a more personal spirituality
...the serenity of the paintings...offer a strong sense of the comfort that comes from spiritual awareness or religious faith, "the peace that passes understanding."
...a celebration of the majesty and variety of nature, done through the wealth of colors King incorporates.
-James D. Watts Jr.
Tulsa World
Expressive color and surreal situations dominate King's work. King meets each surface with vigor seen in active brushstrokes and vibrant hues.
-Tracey Hummer
The Columbus Dispatch
An elusiveness about those paintings challenges the spectator's perception.
-Jacquieline Hall
Columbus Dispatch
King presses, from a limited vocabulary of forms the psychological drone that comes of processing students and others... in which curtains of figures and galloping horses, obsessively repeated are overcome by small armies of dots...incidentally, King's dots have many lives: Sometimes they resemble Pegboard holes. Other times they appear as small raised blobs of paint or as miniature flowers. In the case of the Artist's Mind, a work that sparkles with wry humor, the dots are bugs- brown and oval shaped. They are arranged in formation over a somewhat barren landscape. Kings use of pale pinks and ochres help set the painting's parched mood. Atop a double mountain range fringed with green vegetation, stands a forlorn, leafless tree- a sign of the artist- perhaps waiting for rain.
-Jeanne Fryer Kohles
The Columbus Dispatch
From the Drinking Sky Breathing Sea Catalog...
Walter King is a restless and unique artist whose multifaceted activity embraces drawing, illustration and painting, without leaving aside an intense career in advertising and teaching. In this last role, we had the opportunity to host him as part of our teaching staff in our previous season. Now he brings us a series of pictoral images in which, through a variety of techniques, he reveals an inner world rich in metaphysical suggestions, a product of tireless creative labor.
-Lic. Nora Hochbaum
Director General
Centro Cultural Recoleta
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Walter King (quien es, ademᳬ jefe del Departamento de Ilustració® ¤el Columbus College of Art and Design) define sus propios trabajos como "muy simb󬩣os. A veces misteriosos y tr᧩cos y otras humorí³´icos o subjetivos. Cat󬩣os, por momentos, en el sentido universal, no religioso. Quizá³ mí³´icos, aunque no creo necesariamente en la magia. Mí³´icos en el sentido surrealista, metafí³©co."
El golpe aní©co de los atentados del 11 de setiembre se refleja de manera sutil en su obra má³ reciente. King ve que ahora en ellos "hay un clima sombrí¯® Hay una forma de pensar má³ deprimida, alicaí¤¡ desde ese dí¡® Fue como una epifaní¡® Cuando mi trabajo se volvió ¡s sombrí¯ a partir de ese dí¡¬ comprendí £ó¯ habí¡ sido mi obra antes.
-as reported in Clarin
Buenos Aires,Argentina ...
