Hung just above the easel in the home studio where Steven Walker paints are sheets of printed quotations to keep him inspired.
One sticks out not only for its familiarity but also for its simplicity: “Quality over Quantity.”
“This year, I’m slowing down,” Walker says, “to concentrate on a few pieces.”
Walker, a Westerville resident, is negotiating a juncture in his career where popular artists often find themselves. His fine art canvases are so popular that adequate time and patience to experiment with his work are both scarce. So far, his “quantity” has all been of high quality, but he believes that could change if he doesn’t tap the brakes now.
Trained as an illustrator and therefore skilled with meeting deadlines, he is represented by four galleries – Sharon Weiss Gallery in the Short North and three others in Virginia, Kentucky and North Carolina. Grateful that his proficiency in commercial art allows him to meet customer demand for his work, he admits that patience doesn’t come naturally, but he recognizes its necessity if he is to grow as an artist.
Talking with Walker, one gets the sense that his work ethic and his creative impulses are in a daily scrimmage for his attention.
“You can’t wait for inspiration to come; you’ve got to go out and get it,” he says about his own work.
To his students at the McConnell Arts Center in Worthington, he teaches: “As long as you’re still working your craft and having that patience to know that it’s going to get better, you’ll be fine. “
He is working on taking his own advice.
“Sometimes it’s just doing a little bit of the painting and saying, ‘OK, I’ve got to wait, I’ve got to look at this for a while to see if it’s really working the way I want it to,’” he says.
Walker’s paintings are somewhat reminiscent of early American painters – George Bellows among them – who found beauty in ordinary landscapes. Some of Walker’s most intriguing works feature slender trees ringing a sparse and inviting foreground.
In many canvases, the treetops are cut midway and reflections in pools of water hint at what is not seen.
“For me, it’s drama, and with that, it’s light,” he says. “I wanted to tell a story that’s not necessarily spelled out for you.”
His mastery of light offers visual appeal and his compositions suggest narratives that are just beginning. As a boy, Walker’s family took road trips through the countryside of Virginia, and his paintings echo that universal reaction of discovery around every bend.
“The best times in my life were road trips,” Walker says, where rural country – including cows, farmhouses, trees and streams – were new images lacking i
n his suburban upbringing.
“Getting lost sometimes … really took me to a good place,” he says.
Walker hopes cutting back on producing so many gallery shows this year will allow for some time to get lost as the rubber hits the road, and at the easel, where paint meets the imagination.
Walker is contributing several paintings to the 2014 Governor’s Awards for the Arts ceremony, which takes place May 21. Each of this year’s winners will receive an original work by Walker.
Cindy Gaillard is an Emmy award-winning producer with WOSU Public Media. Learn more about the weekly arts and culture magazine show Broad & High at www.wosu.org/broadandhigh.
