BLACK PAINTINGS
A native New Orleanian, Walton keeps his home town and its own complex identities at the heart of his work. He uses the medium of paint to reflect on his experiences of seeing New Orleans as both a vibrant and important cultural heritage site and a commercialized but shallow destination for visitors not unlike “Disneyland.”
Of the 100 paintings in the Black Painting all are begun with a black ground and layered with toothy bright colors and scrawling, meandering lines. Walton takes viewers on a journey through layers of meaning touching on themes of Black identity, computer culture, social media aesthetics and pop culture. His paintings and methods are not without humor but the conversations are of serious and relevant material to this region’s communities.
As he developed from a kid who liked to make art, to one who studied art, to now a practicing artist, he grew excited by Byzantine gold, Van Gogh’s mad squiggles, Basquiat’s spatial mayhem, Jeff Koons’s vacuum cleaners and their lesson of the limitless freedom of materials. An artist can (and should) use anything. Walton practices this almost recklessly; his subjects run the gamut of politicians, his friends, urban mayhem and childhood objects all depicted with equal and frank rendering. Walton incorporates art history by making Byzantine gold the same gold of the bullets he once filled a gumball machine with. And art history in his works is conjured by more than just object references. Walton wonders what painting fast and thin infers. For Basquiat it meant bringing graffiti off the street. Walton has already accepted that street and home can’t be separated, won’t be separated. Quick, single-dipped brushstrokes when he renders flooding streets and alligators in 6-Flags Amusement Park are how he makes connection to Basquiat’s past, this city’s present, and his own unknowable future. His paintings, then, are a collaboration between individual and environment, art history and art practice. This is what makes Walton’s works worth noting and continuing to watch.