Curt Walters
b. 1950
Many artists who have traveled the world to paint its variety have nonetheless become linked with a single place and a single topic. So Edgar Payne, Diego Rivera, Marc Chagall and Childe Hassam. The list might be much longer and would surely include Curt Walters. The native New Mexican’s career has taken him far and wide in search of subjects for his pleine-aire brush, but his name is more closely associated with Arizona’s Grand Canyon than that of any painter alive today.
Walters was but eighteen years old when he first saw the Grand Canyon. As is true of so many artists, one experience has served as a fathomless spring for his artistic creativity. Today he is known world-wide for his Grand Canyon images and for his civic involvement in the protection of this great masterwork of nature.
Year after year, Walters’ work has taken honors of every kind in the nation’s most important painting competitions. At the Autry Museum’s Masters of the American West exhibition in 2008, he won the James R. Parks Trustees’ Purchase Award and won the Patron’s Choice Award in the same exhibition in 2010 at New York’s Salmagundi Club. At Oklahoma City’s Prix de West, Walters has repeatedly taken top honors including the Nona Jean Hulsey Rumsey Buyers’ Choice Award, the Buyers’ Choice Award, the Frederic Remington Award and the Prix de West Purchase Award. The Eiteljorg Museum’s Quest for the West exhibitions have honored him with the Patrons’ Choice Award and its Artist of Distinction Award.
The gallery is very pleased to add the work of this distinguished and highly decorated artist to its roster of outstanding American painters.
