Big and small, murals, prints, and drawings, Ken Walters’s popular creations are colourful, impactful, and imbued with a kind of solidity and a democratic treatment of form and colour. Human shapes and faces are of the same, or less, importance than boats, toolboxes, fenders, the shadows of rigging, or a distant landscape. It all matters. It’s all matter. There’s a sombre comfort in these images that are in no way fanciful.
Ken came to art a little later in life, after 18 years working for CP Rail in Western Canada. It was a night school course in Art History at Douglas College in Surrey that swung open a door for him that never closed. He decided to go to art school full time. A student summer job gave him the opportunity to work on his first mural, a 5000 square foot work for a church in Surrey. Mural making, such a popular public art form, lends itself to cooperation, collaboration, teaching, and mentoring. Since his student beginnings Ken has taught life drawing, run a gallery and, after moving to Madeira Park, become active again in mural making, both on his own and with students, encouraging a new generation of mural painters. Ken feels compelled to give back; in his words, “I was taught at a young age that if you knew how to do something, pass it on, or you’re just satisfying your own ego.” These days, he enjoys using his drafting experience, pen and ink, and pencil crayons. “I still manage a painting now and then,” he says, “but my main focus at this time is the Sunshine Coast prints.”
His work can be linked to a resurgence of realism in Canadian art. There’s a sense of optimism in the ordered presentation of familiar, everyday scenes. Yet there’s a whiff of impressionism in the heightened colours and the liberty with which he adds curves and sensual lines. Ken Walters’s beautiful illustrations can be seen in many children’s books and in logos, wall charts, and flashcards. His murals are in private residences and public places up and down the Sunshine Coast and in Hawaii, Mexico, and Costa Rica
