For many winters, Bart Walker grabbed his ice axe or skis and headed for the backcountry. Summers he was mountain biking or wilderness-bound with his fly rod. Now Walker is outdoors painting the allure of the wild land. Back in the solitude of his studio, he uses oil sketches done in the field to recollect nature’s evocative beauty on a finished canvas. Bart’s radiant plein air paintings are reminiscent of early California impressionist landscapes, alive with deft brushwork and soft nuances of light.
Bart’s studies sit deep along his studio walls. Picking up several, Walker talks about working as a plein air artist. His is the kind of excitement that rocked impressionists when they realized that not only the glories of color, but also the splendors of light, could be captured on canvas. Recent studies play with the color and blended luminosity in the whiteness of a snow-covered field. They explore shafts of sunlight breaking through shadows on a forest floor or backlighting a mountain stream.
“Painting is all I want to do,” Walker states simply, “and I want to do it well.” “Living in the Teton Valley, I’ll never run out of beautiful places to paint. But as an artist, I also want to do still life’s, architectural paintings and figurative pieces as well.”
Walker’s ability challenges “nature or nurture?” quandaries. Both his father and older brother are accomplished painters, and before picking up a paintbrush Walker had a successful 15-year career designing and crafting fine lodge-pole furnishings. If talent is not inherited, certainly sensitivity and perseverance were qualities modeled at home.
Artist instructors and friends Scott Christensen, Tim Lawson, Robert Moore, Kang Cho, Skip Whitcomb, Matt Smith and Zhang Wen Zin, and well-thumbed books on Schmid, Reese, Fechin, Zorn and Sorolla are Walker’s masterful mentors. “But” he says, “Now I know the basics, I want canvases filled with my own spirit.”
“Some artist are known for painting landscapes well, or maybe people,” he remarks, as if describing a stranglehold on the heart of creativity. “I want to be known for painting well.” Over the past decade Walker has had numerous successful one man and group shows in the Pacific Northwest and the Rocky Mountain Region. Bart won “Best of Show” in the 2007 Frank Bette Plein Air Paintout in Alameda, California and 2008 “Best of Show” in the Christopher Queen Galleries Painter’s Eden.
Bart Walker makes his home in Teton Valley, Idaho with his wife, Tracy. He paints in the plein air tradition and exhibits his work throughout the country.
