Meet Walter Askin | Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Walter Askin and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Walter, what habits do you feel play an important role in your life?
When I was in school/college, whatever line of thinking the teacher/professor started to talk about… the first idea in a chain of ideas… this would set me off on my own associations. Something would jolt me during my personal journey and I would return to the classroom/lecture hall to discover that while I had somehow wound my way to Byzantium, the lecturer was in Mobile Alabama. This gap produced a unique mental state where conjecture predominated over reality. You might call it “How I learned to love mystery more than reality.” Nearly all my art remains in that strange, ambivalent situation where I can’t explain anything about what I do so I make up the explanation as well. It’s all very confusing but as a professor you learn how to fake certainty and provide concrete ideas for others which are not yours.

My works are mysteries to me (as well as everyone else) and are useful in sparking my imaginative life – which leads to even more mysteries.

Those who forget the past are free to do whatever they want.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
We’ve shifted gears on the highway of art. Even individuals making a superficial inventory of reality find its not made to our personal manufacturing specifications. So it doesn’t make any sense as an artist to base one’s work on a mere reading of the world. There must be an attempt to construct an alternate reality.

This new realm could simply express the delight of pure visual experience, a world of forms and colors. But while most of us do not reject the premise of “other” reality “real,” to allow it to seductively trigger an expansive range of responses, for it to release liberating and transforming experiences for viewers, for it to approach the fullness of being, – this requires the full orchestra of visual language with dreaded narration as an essential ingredient.

Who wants to be boring? Who wants to live a pictorial life behind restraining walls and barriers? Who wants to play the game with players and parts missing? Who wants to enjoin the pictorial war without a full complement of weapons?

In the post-broken-soup-bowl art world, in the post-kicking-and-screaming-oh-the-agony-of-it-all movement, under the golden arches of art, there are those who strive to create world-class experiences rooted in polarities, the contrasts and contradictions, the confluences, narration brings to art.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
The Huntington Library, The Beckman Auditorium

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
In my youth, I would get excited along with the others in my classes when the teacher posed a question. My hand would go up along with theirs. Fortunately, the teacher never called on me, and so, when I found that my answer was not THE RIGHT ANSWER I would be relieved that I had not been chosen. I came round to the idea that everyone gets it but me; mysteries are every where; perplexity is normal – the acceptance that mystery is a form of knowing like Plato’s “to not know and know you don’t know” – allows mystery to become part of being alive to the unknown: IGNORANCE BAD/MYSTERY GOOD.

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/walteraskin/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/WalterAskin

Other: https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-walter-askin-13013 https://www.walteraskin.net https://walteraskin.art https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKeC3JoxJ8E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9xJ9aLx6sY&t=733s

Image Credits
Artworks copyright Walter Askin.