Limitless Possibilities
Arizona artist
Curt Walters finds
endless ways to portray the grandeur of the Grand Canyon By Gussie Fauntleroy
IN THE MID-1980s,
while preparing for a presentation to a local arts group, Curt Walters was going through slides of dozens of paintings he’d done of the Grand Canyon when he noticed something odd. The colors in the atmosphere over the canyon had changed in the 15 or so years since he’d made it a central focus of his art. And it wasn’t just a shift in his preferred palette; as a plein-air painter with a strong naturalistic bent, the artist had always been as true as possible to the hues he saw before him. Another thing struck him as well: Visibility across the Colorado Plateau, the vast geologic formation the canyon eroded, seemed more limited in later works, even on clear days. As he pondered these changes, Walters became aware of an interesting yet very disturbing fact: His art had unwittingly documented an indisputable decline in the air quality over America’s most treasured landmark. It was a tragic trend, not only for the world but for a passionate painter who at age 19 had taken on the mammoth challenge of portraying the canyon’s almost inexpressible beauty, complexity, and depth. Years before even catching his first awestruck glimpse of the Grand Canyon, Walters was gazing off in the distance at beautiful vistas and thinking about how to paint them. As a boy driving a tractor on his father’s farm in northwestern New Mexico, he took in the surrounding mountain ranges and cliffs, cloud formations, shadows, and sunlit land. To his mother’s horror—and looking back now, he smiles and calls himself a “16-year-old dummy” for doing it—he climbed to the peak of the farm’s enormous gambrel-roofed barn and sat up there to paint Shiprock, a regional landmark. While the landscape around him provided visual inspiration, Walters was also surrounded by fine art. His father, a dentist, farmer, and inveterate “dabbler,” as his son puts it, collected art and had an artistic leaning himself. Although the younger MONUMENTS TO INFINITY, OIL, 30 X 80. WEATHERED SPLENDOR, OIL, 60 X 48.
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[the great landscape]
“The Grand Canyon is structurally very complicated.
It’s geology at its max. It’s a monumental challenge.” Walters never actually saw him paint, he knew that at one time his father had tried his hand at it. And it was his father who provided Walters’ first paint set—albeit a set intended as a gift to his little sister. “I was 12 or 13, and like only an older brother can do, I said, ‘Give that here! I’ll show you how to do it!’” the 57-year-old artist recalls, laughing. More quietly he adds, “I always wanted to paint. I never wanted to do anything else.” A few years later, in the orange, mag-wheeled Mercury Montego his father had given him as a high school graduation present, Walters made his first trip to the Grand Canyon. He tried to paint it. “That painting was terrible, just terrible,” he declares. Intimidated, yet somehow undaunted, he accepted the canyon’s challenge—to learn to paint the vistas he had fallen in love with there.
“THE GRAND CANYON
is structurally very complicated. It’s erosion at its max, geology at its max. It’s made up of complicated forms with all the layers twisted, nothing straight, and the rules of linear perspective almost don’t work,” Walters explains. “So you really have to learn the forms in a geologic sense, then you have to put each of these forms one behind the other to create an aerial perspective, then you have to compensate, because shadows move across the canyon—it changes every 30 minutes. And then you apply factors according to the season and air quality conditions. It’s a monumental challenge.” But, clearly, it’s a challenge Walters loves. Since that first trip he has returned literally hundreds of times and created at least 600 paintings of the Grand Canyon. Many, including some as large as 40 by 60 inches, have been painted on location. Described by some as “the greatest living Grand Canyon artist,” Walters has earned numerous awards. Among them: the Prix de West’s 2007 Purchase Award, plus three previous Prix de West Buyers’ Choice Awards and two Fredric Remington Awards; the Patrons’ Choice Award and two awards for best individual work at the Eiteljorg Museum’s Quest for the West show; and Patrons’ Choice awards at both the Autry Museum’s Masters of the American West show and the now-defunct Artists of America show. Walters’ work is in many permanent collections, including that of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Getting to this point has been a long, determined road. Walters began by enrolling i n New Mexico State University. He was looking for academic training in representational painting, but that was hard to find during the era of abstract expressionism. He quit after two years. A MOST DESIRABLE MOMENT, OIL, 50 X 60. WINTER AT TAOS PUEBLO, OIL, 36 X 36. CANYON SINUOSITY, OIL, 50 X 40.
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[the great landscape] He came away with some important peripheral lessons, however, in things like the nature of beauty. One painting instructor, who irritated him but made him think, asked the class to “paint something ugly.” Walters sprinted off, and—perhaps foreshadowing his future concerns about air pollution—painted a power plant. “It stirred up a conversation about what is beautiful and what is ugly that has always stuck with me,” he notes. “You can see beauty in a lot of stuff. Is something truly, visually ugly, or is it just our interpretation?” The real, technical lessons about painting began for Walters when he moved to Taos, determined to be a working artist. During his five years there he took advantage of the proximity of landscape artists he admired, absorbing everything he could from their comments and critiques. “The biggest influence was probably Rod Goebel,” he reflects. “He was a great painter with a quirky personality. He would just touch the canvas and say, ‘Put some light here,’ and the change would be like magic.” Of Albuquerquebased landscape artist Wilson Hurley, Walters declares: “I learned more from him in 20 minutes than from two years in college.” In 1979 Walters, who by then was doing well enough with his art to have bought a house in Taos, was invited to show in a Sedona gallery. Soon he moved to Sedona, attracted to the town, its surrounding red-rock cliffs, warmer climate, and relative closeness of the Grand Canyon. The great gorge
continued to pull him with its magnificence and artistic challenge—and then, with the challenge of understanding what was behind its changing atmospheric conditions. “You can stand on the rim and on a clear day you can see 250 miles. It blows your mind! But when there’s pollution in the sky, the visibility can be limited to 50 or 60 miles. That’s still good but not fabulous,” he observes. “My nature is to be environmentally conscious, so I was very sensitive to the atmospheric changes over the Canyon. And I found a group doing something about it.” That group is the Grand Canyon Trust (www.grandcanyontrust.org), which has used public education and litigation to require polluters, such as the coal-burning Navajo Generating Station, to install scrubbers in smoke stacks. The result has been a visible improvement in air quality over the Grand Canyon. Feeling indebted to the Canyon for the immeasurable richness of experience it has provided him, as well as for its role in his career, Walters has used his art to raise almost $1 million in donations for the Grand Canyon Trust over the years. Among the fund-raising events he has organized was a 1999 rafting trip through the canyon with 16 artist friends. The trip resulted in dozens of paintings, which were featured in major exhibitions in New York and San Francisco. The shows brought national attention to the Grand Canyon Trust and the problem of the air quality over the Colorado Plateau, and a portion of receipts from the art sales went to the trust. Today the organization continues to put
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legal pressure on polluting industries to minimize harm to the atmosphere. Walters continues to offer his support, and also gives his backing to the Grand Canyon Foundation, a friends-of-theCanyon organization that funds projects such as wheelchair-accessible rim trails. After all these years as the subject of Walter s’ paintings, the yawning chasm’s land forms have not gotten any less complex. But the artist, of course, has gathered a tool kit of experience and techniques to make an impossible task possible. One key is saving samples of color mixes from paintings done on location. He labels them—“talus slope” or “cloud shadow”—and thus has a head start on mixing colors once he’s back in the studio working on a large canvas of the same scene. He also mixes big batches of all the colors he will need for a painting before he applies the first brush stroke, saving the mixtures on paper palettes in the freezer for the weeks it can take to complete a large piece. Walters has traveled and painted in many places around the world, including Bali, Mexico, Jordan, and throughout most of Europe. He paints cityscapes, seascapes, palm trees, and ponds, but he always returns to what he calls “the ultimate place to visit.” And to paint. “Honestly, I’ve never done the same Grand Canyon painting twice,” he affirms. “It’s limitless. It’s endless. That’s what keeps it fresh.” E Santa Fe-based Gussie Fauntleroy also writes for Art & Antiques, New Mexico Magazine, Native Peoples, and the Santa Fean.
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