12/14/08

This was a huge seven foot painting I did for a show with Erin Ruiz at Visual Arts Collective.

balloon cat

Excerpts from the Boise Weekly article written by Tara Morgan about the show;

With only a month to get work together for the show, both Ruiz and Walter were under a considerable amount of stress to complete their pieces before the public opening last Friday, Aug. 8. As with the bathroom walls—where Ruiz and Walter painted at different times and rarely bumped into each other—neither artist had seen the other's work for their current exhibit until the day before the show's opening.

The work features a stitched together, FernGully-esque fire monster destroying a city and belching smoke. The cartoonish ghosts of burned houses float aimlessly through the darkening sky. Like much of Walter's work, Soul Housing depicts a chaotic, yet resigned confrontation between destruction and despair.

Another of Walter's pieces in the exhibit, which sold almost immediately, has a comparable feel. Blue Birds shows a highly detailed jumble of grounded birds that are struggling to spread their wings and break free of the flock. It's hard to tell whether the few sickly birds in the cream-colored sky are flying up or falling down. A barbed wire fence in the background imbues the environment with a labor-camp-like sense of desperation. This frenzied lack of control is a thread that runs through all of the work in the exhibit, including Ruiz's.

And though both Ruiz and Walters have found considerable success in the Boise art market, their highly detailed, illustrative method has its roots planted firmly in the street art scene—a style many in the art world have snobbishly pegged as "low brow" or "pop-surrealism." Because this largely self-taught movement has more in common with tattoos and graphic novels than art-school-sanctified fine art, it has remained largely illegitimate in certain critical circles.