The Brooklyn Rail

The paintings of Walter Price have breath. They are nuanced. They are fluid, and they freely associate. Sometimes this fluidity breaks. It staggers, it stops, it snaps, only to give way to new formation. The paintings transcend even the simplest of polemics. They are nimble and difficult worlds. They embrace the potential of form and painting and its materiality.

Walter Price is an artist born in 1989 in Macon, Georgia, living and working in Brooklyn. Price served in the US Navy before attending art school in Georgia and Virginia. On the occasion of his exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Michelle Grabner spoke with Price on the New Social Environment (Episode #1088). The conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity.

Michelle Grabner (Rail): So Walter, what do you think about the Keith Haring show, Art Is for Everybody, that juxtaposed your work when your exhibition opened?

Walter Price: I think that Keith Haring was doing something bigger than himself. His works are colorful, and they welcome you with that color, but they’re serious, and it is a very bold seriousness that is much different from my work. I guess I don’t take myself as seriously, and I’m not dealing with such serious, heavy topics in my work, so I guess in respect to Keith Haring, I was surprised at the juxtaposition, but I think the colors are what did it, and the liveliness of his work.

Rail: Yes, it was contrasting. And when we talk about the essay Darby English wrote for the catalogue, we can talk a bit more about how he sets up Pop—which is how we would understand Keith Haring—as a kind of populist sensibility to the work that you’re doing. But tell me, how did this exhibition come about? Can you talk a little bit about that?

Price: It came about through Rosario Güiraldes, who I met at the Drawing Center. She was the Associate Curator at the Drawing Center, and she included me in a show there. You know, I don’t set too many goals, but that was one. I was obsessed with being in the Drawing Center. Drawing is the foundation of my practice. At the time, I was so much more serious about drawing. So my big goal was to get into the Drawing Center, but after I settled down with that, I just wanted to be acknowledged by the Drawing Center.

Rosario Güiraldes was the connecting voice. From the moment she did a studio visit with me and wanted to include me in the show, I put her at a very high position, a lot of respect, because she is the person who I will always remember got me into the Drawing Center. And then she went to the Walker and she brought me along. So it’s thanks to her, Rosario. Thank you, Rosario.

Rail: And thank you for underscoring the importance of the Drawing Center. It’s an exceptional institution. I’m curious to learn about the title, Pearl Lines. Could you talk about the title? And why do you keep repeating the title Pearl Lines? What does that mean?

Price: It has several meanings for me. The first way I can describe it is that they’re simply beautiful words. When I talk about drawing being a foundation to my practice, it becomes slightly part of my identity. When I think about a line, the word “pearl” is just so beautiful to put in front of it, and I like how it’s ambiguous. Different people can read into it in so many ways that are not connected to me. But it has a very personal meaning to me that I don’t want to reveal so much to a large audience. [Laughter] I need to keep as much mystery as possible.

When I repeat the title it’s not only because it sounds beautiful. It’s something that I want to attempt to exhaust. A lot of times I’ve noticed with artists, we have different ideas for shows. And each time we do a show, it’s this different thing or a different theme. I thought that it would be distinctive to start to repeat things. There’s so much out there that it can muddy your mind. So I thought it would be interesting to repeat the title enough to where it is really associated with me, and it also builds a world around my art. So everything can just kind of flow within that title in a way.

Rail: I didn’t know it had a personal connection to you. And I’m glad that that balances out a kind of criticality actually. If you think about it, it becomes a refrain. But at the same time, what I’m hearing you say is that with so much material churning through contemporary art right now, it’s really hard to hang on to something for a longer period of time, to kind of dwell on it, or to let its interpretations change and grow. It protracts time and ideas and asks us to think again very slowly. So thank you for that answer. Walter, I’m going to segue a little bit. Can you talk a little bit about your beginnings: your training and your relationship to painting?

Price: I’ve always been interested in art. I’m the youngest of five, and my brothers and sisters were always into music and more social things. I’ve always kind of been in my own world. My comfort zone is introverted. So I’ve always been different from them, but in a way where they never told me what I was doing was weird or discouraged me from drawing and doodling. So in a way, with their support and allowing me to do that, I just kind of figured early on that I wanted to be some type of artist.

I started cartooning early on and thinking that I was going to be a comic book artist. I used to send these little short comics to syndicates and stuff, hoping I was going to get an opportunity. So it started really early in that way. And from there on, I just started taking art classes, art school. I took these commercial online classes called Art Instruction School. You draw something and they give you a grade, you mail it in and mail it back. I just committed to art at an early age. And when I got to college, I really admired this printmaker named Craig Burkhalter. He was my main professor. And it was a moment where I wanted to dive more into painting. And that’s where we had a clash. He was really committed to printmaking, and that’s when I really set out to be a painter. We argued, and he said some discouraging things to me that I needed to hear at the time. I need someone to tell me I can’t do it, for me to do it. [Laughs] What’s weird is that now I use a lot of printmaking techniques in my work. But yeah, he gave me the fire I needed.

Rail: Do you remember your first painting?

Price: My first painting probably was a spray painting. I spray painted text in an abandoned house. I used to sneak around my neighborhood and go into these abandoned houses and do art installations and stuff. I don’t remember exactly what, but it was text based. It was harmless, because the houses were going to get renovated anyway, and I never got in trouble for it. I wasn’t breaking in—the doors were already open. So yeah, I got to do art installations early on. So those were probably my first paintings.

Rail: When did you pivot to a canvas or panel support?

Price: Probably as early as seventh or eighth grade. I had an art teacher who brought those store-bought stretched canvases, and we got to go at it. I was already starting to understand that this is the type of support that I would be painting on as an artist.

Rail: That’s fascinating. I’m going to have to think about what it means when that kind of traditional yet manufactured painting support comes into the middle school classroom, and how we think about instilling those values going forward as painters and teachers.

Price: I think it’s important to have art classes at a young age. I mean, you go to school, and for those of us who don’t fall in love with a certain subject—math or science or whatever—when you get to go to that art class, they just have all the materials out, and it’s free flowing. You can play around, you can talk to each other. It’s so much play! Being an art teacher seemed much more enjoyable than what the science teachers did. [Laughter] But if you love what you do, it feels that way—energy-wise. Art teachers always have that.

Rail: So I’m going to pivot to the studio, and I’m going to evoke John Cage for a moment, who told Philip Guston, “When you start working, everybody is in your studio.” He’s speaking metaphorically. He’s talking about, when you’re in your studio, histories and cultural events enter in, friends and family are there, enemies are there, your dealers, your curators. Your ideas are integrated with this whole teeming array of voices. Cage goes on to say that as you continue painting, these people, these ideas, these histories, start to leave one by one. So my question is, who was in your studio when you began painting? You already talked about that print professor, but who’s in your studio now?

Price: Oh, that’s a good question. Well, Professor Burkhalter, I’m sure he’s retired now, and I don’t want to be slandering his name. He’s an old man. But he was never in my studio. I mean, he got me from A to B, but arriving in New York and getting a studio and really committing, or even being in New York City and saying you’re an artist, or attempting to be an artist—it’s just a whole different world.

Professor Burkhalter gave me enough fire and motivation to get to New York, because it’s hard to come from a small town where you are comfortable, and to come into the discomfort of the big city. So in my studio now? I don’t think it’s anyone. It’s never really anyone in here anymore. It’s all happiness. All I hear is, “Man, I can’t believe I’m getting to do this.” If I’m hearing a voice, it’s like, “Man, I can’t believe this is real. Oh, man, I can’t believe this is my life.” All the hard work, all the risk and sacrifice is worth it. Each time I come into the studio, I’m never coming in here to be anything but happy. There’s no anger, no sadness. It’s just all being grateful. I never have a hard time in my studio. It’s the best place. [Laughs]

Rail: But Walter, is there anybody that you want to celebrate with? I mean, do you think about figures from history? Or individuals who are contemporaneous?

Price: Well, I guess I want to give credit to seeing Jacob Lawrence’s work early on. I saw him maybe in a textbook or something, a photo of him, in what looked like a Navy uniform. Maybe he was in the Coast Guard. Anyway, I remember seeing him in a uniform standing beside one of his paintings. And that gave me the idea that I could go to the military and they could pay for my education. That gave me an understanding that I could look into the military in transitioning to trying to be an artist.

So Jacob Lawrence is a very important figure, but I also like how he paints. Even though my style is much looser, I like how angular and blocky his works are. Although it’s illustrating a figure or a scene or a narrative, it still can flow into abstraction a little bit with this blockiness. So I like that, and that kind of led me into maybe how I paint at times where it’s very much looser, but it kind of tried to shift them between that figuration and abstraction.

Sam Gilliam is an influence, but just because of how beautiful his works are and the way that he uses color. Jimmy Lee Sudduth, and so many other folk artists—people doing art out of necessity and love and joy—I saw that early on. It probably was ingrained in me that these people had to make art. They weren’t performing. They were doing what they needed to do, and it gave them peace. So, yeah, those are some of the people who are the foundation to my practice.

Rail:. Let’s go back to 2018, when we first got to know each other. I was the artistic director of FRONT International that had venues in Cleveland, Akron, and Oberlin, at museums and galleries throughout the greater Ohio region, and I actually juxtaposed your work in a large gallery at MOCA Cleveland, with the visionary artist—or sometimes we call them an outsider artist, or an artist with an expansive imagination—

Price: “Outsider artist” is so harsh.

Rail: I know. It’s wrong. “Visionary artist” is what we’re hanging on to right now. I juxtaposed your work with Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, who was from Milwaukee. He was on one side of the gallery, you were on the other. That’s when I first started looking deeply at your work. And then when I was putting together the catalogue, I asked the many artists included in FRONT—there were over one hundred—to have conversations with each other. I feel very strongly about foregrounding artists’ voices and how artists think, and there’s nothing that gives me more pleasure than hearing artists talk to each other. So I paired you with Jessica Vaughn, who is a very different kind of artist, also based in New York. And in your back and forth, you said a couple things and one was that you trust your intuition and everyday experience. Do you want to elaborate on that?

Price: Well, I was raised mostly by women. I have two older sisters and my mom was a very dominant personality. She was one of those southern women who kind of spoke to her intuition and her power. They know when you’re doing something. They know when their kid is being mischievous and stuff. So I guess early on, I always wanted to have those powers in a way. So trusting my intuition—mostly I trust myself. I mean, I’m the artist, so it’s important to trust myself. Although there are rules that you have to learn that end up being broken, you also establish your own rules, and you are the ace boon coon. So, yeah, it’s more about self confidence.

Rail: If you trust yourself in terms of your influences or the material that is driving the work, then varied interpretations from viewers that are different than your intentions or your intuitions are okay with you? You had a really beautiful anecdote about interpretation that I want to return too. You were talking about going to church, and rejecting preaching?

Price: Growing up in the South, I was forced to go to church. Out of all my sisters and brothers, I was the one that got in the most trouble because I really didn’t want to go to church. But being from the South and growing up in the church, I feel like as a person, I can be very preachy. So I try my best not to be that way. As the artist of the artwork, I kind of want conversations to be open and have good discussions with people, because they’re bringing their perspective, and y’all can ping pong off of each other, and it just creates a beautiful conversation, rather than me taking myself too seriously and saying, “No, I want you to see my work a certain way.” For me, painting doesn’t have to be that way.

Rail: I so appreciate that. I think that is the great gift of being an artist, letting other people do that interpretive work for you.

Price: I would not want to define myself, and I feel that being so committed to an artist statement just limits your creativity in a way, or it limits the conversation that someone can have with you when they approach you. They’d be like. “Oh, so your work is about this,” because that’s what’s been put in the statement. And, that’s it. They get it. They get you.

Words are dangerous with paintings. That’s why putting text in paintings can be taboo to some artists. Because words in general can be damaging to painting, expressing ideas and stuff, because it’s just defining. It’s like a brick.

Rail: I want to go on to something that you said in your conversation with Jessica Vaughn in the catalogue for FRONT. You said you are interested in the fact that painting’s materiality can be detached from narrative. Flesh that out a little bit.

Price: So when I’m painting, I may want to illustrate something, but I also may just love a dash of paint, a good mixture of maybe metallic red or metallic silver with a red, lightened up a little bit with white. And I may just like how it looks as a mark, and I think that’s important too, because it’s all a push and pull within the painting anyway. No matter what, the mind is going to try to decipher what your eyes see. I can appreciate narrative, but I don’t want to look like I’m just trying to tell a story, because my memory is not even good enough for me to tell stories half of the time. I was also trying to speak to the beauty of mark making and the importance of a beautiful gesture, a beautiful mark, a beautiful glob of paint.

Rail: I really want to talk about that dashed line in a little bit. But maybe we can talk now about It got uncomfortable, immediately! (2022). Can you talk a little bit about line and its relationship to style? What I am particularly drawn to in this painting is that each of the figures is delineated in a slightly different stylistic way. I can see a little Picasso, but I can also see Matisse, and I can see some cartooning. And then also, speaking of materiality, there’s the extreme materiality of the attachment of a framed drawing directly onto the painting surface. Can you talk about this painting?

Price: These types of paintings are very fun, because it’s literally just drawing to me, honestly; it feels just like just drawing with paint. And I wanted to emphasize the line so that the idea of drawing can rise to the top a little bit in someone’s mind. The figures aren’t fully developing, but the painting is giving you enough, because your mind does the rest. I like learning about how the brain works, and knowing that as soon as we see things, we try to interpret them. You can just give enough of a shoulder or arm, you don’t have to do the arms, sometimes you just do that motion, and your brain gets it. I don’t have to paint hyper realistic for someone to say, oh, or “ that’s a man with his nose tutted up in the air. He maybe thinks he’s better than everybody else in the line.”

So if I’m focusing on just a line and not so much the shape, which is the style I choose to go with, the line does have to have more. It has to be a little lighter, a little fuzzy— I mean, even in drawing practice, when you do that little shaky line in the beginning of learning how to draw, you know, that’s that seen as unconfident, but then it becomes the contrast to the precision of a very clean line. So I think about how all that reads to the mind.

So when I do render the image, because these images are rendered fairly quickly, I’m more focused on the movement, the finesse of the line compared to the next line. So if I do the character all the way in the back of the line and that little—maybe the person would be a little white, a little fuzzy, hazy white here next to the red striped shirt. Of course I wanted to go with more lines and more stripes, because that area next to it was hazy and white. [Laughter]

The framed drawing that’s attached to it, that comes from me being in my own world. In some of my smaller paintings, I’ll put a silhouette head looking into the picture scene. I like this idea of the viewer looking at the shadow of someone looking into the scene, and how that kind of plays with your mind. It’s almost like, are we wondering the same thing? What are we looking at? So I’ve repeated that move so many times, I wanted to take it to a next step, which is, how radical would it be to literally take one of your own framed drawings and just place it on and show the screws, show the work, the tools you use to collage it on, in that way where even then, the figure is looking towards what would be the scene, so it’s still referencing that, but just in a way where I also felt like I hadn’t seen that before.

Rail: I want to talk about the golden, Turneresque atmospheric painting, I don't wanna make somebody else. I wanna make myself. (2022). I keep asking myself, what are we not seeing? For me, this painting is about what is concealed. Again, there’s that dash line, which you use pretty regularly. It slows my looking down. It moves me over the painting’s surface in the same way I move around Warhol’s graphic dance step paintings. It creates movement. It’s diagrammatic, in a sense, but it also delays the quick gestural energies that are happening over the golden, almost interference-like brush sweeps covering much of the painting’s surface. Please, talk about this painting.

Price: Well, this is me edging as closely to abstraction as I can, because I feel inherently, I’m a figurative artist. But I’m aspiring to be a great abstract artist. So I feel like this painting is trying to let me slowly find a way to get there. [Laughter] I recently had a head injury and I had to get up under an MRI machine. That’s when I started seeing how they draw the brain. I thought about how the brain is just these muscles that are tangled, and I thought to myself, it would be interesting to take that motion and simplify it as much as I can, to use it as a tool for abstracting my images.

So initially, I was trying to make these very abstract political landscapes. I play a lot of chess, but I’m not a good chess player. It’s almost like I want to make so many consistent mistakes until I get good at the game, rather than studying and doing things the right way. So I was placing the chess pieces in what I call a landscape to play on this idea of the game of chess being like a game of war. It’s a fun game, and it’s a game that is respected as intellectual, but it kind of has some evil to it too. So I saw it as a way to symbolize this game of war that we are at in life.

For me the dotted lines are beautiful because they grab your eyes, and they are very directional, so they can take you where you want to go. I mean, take you to wherever I want you to go. So it was just in a way me being a little full of myself, in a bit of being like, “Oh, I love how beautiful that figure eight looks.” And I want to just highlight some of those moments, but at the same time thinking about the composition. So I kind of added a lot of them in this left area, because I was playing into the way, you know, we’re taught to compose something.

Rail: Listening to you talk about chess and the idea of positioning is really interesting. How one can use that line in terms of a direction, it makes me think of another painting, Star spangled (2023). In this painting the line slows us down too, and it is a very different kind of speed than some of your other material investigations here. Same thing with the repetition of the stars that dot the composition. Here the stars are stamped. Is that right? Or are they stencils?

Price: I started to use a lot more stencils for the stars, because looking back at some of my early paintings, and me hand drawing my stars and doing them so fast, sometimes I got a little insecure about how sloppy they were, so I realized that if you use a stencil, it doesn’t matter how loosely it’s applied. The stencil gives it structure. So when you look at some of these stars up close, they’re very loose and the edges are a little frayed.

Rail: I want to segue to color, and I’m going to give you some observations on color because color, I believe, is as important to you as your embrace of line quality. Friedrich Nietzsche said all that has given color to existence still lacks history. John Ruskin declares color as sacred. And Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote that color spurs us to philosophize. I’m wondering, what is your thinking about color? How do you locate it in the world, and how do you think about it in your paintings?

Price: Color, for me, is more about play and dancing. I like to make paintings with color palettes that are both congruent and incongruent. I don’t think each color has to get along, because when you’re working in a workplace, everybody doesn't get along, but y’all work together to make sure that company is good. So I kind of see it as that.

Also it’s a way to dance around the politics, being a Black artist, you know certain colors or certain figures—if you paint them brown or black, it starts to read into politics, Black life, and all of this stuff. So I feel like color is also a device that I use to work with and against how people read my paintings based on my biography. But mostly I approach color as play.

Rail: So why the decision to hang your paintings on black walls? You’ve used deep dark value colors before as backdrops to the paintings. For me, that acutely intensifies the color in your paintings.

Price: I like it for several reasons. When you paint these walls black, people experience the exhibition more like an installation. Walking into the space, you become absorbed in this world, and I think, in a weird way, it allows people to relax a little bit. Maybe for daydreamers or people that are very imaginative, walking into that space, it’s more fulfilling, because of what the black allows for. And also it’s such a contrast to expectations. People expect the walls in an exhibition of paintings to be white. White walls are seen as pure and angelic, and the color black is like, dark, evil—that’s kind of fucked up. So I’m like why don’t I create these beautiful spaces, allowing black to be the base, to push color forward and create these very great environments? It creates a positive effect, because it’s giving the beautiful colors room to glow.

Rail: It can create this kind of theatrical effect as well, which I think is effective. As we wrap up, I want to segue to Darby’s essay, because it’s exceptional. He brings in three artists to give context to your work. One of them is Peter Saul, and he is talking about Peter Saul and his paintings and their relationships to local truths, and, more importantly, Saul’s ability to integrate the personal and the social. Then he brings in Sigmar Polke, who was always challenging Pop’s composure, agreeability, and popular vexations. And the third artist is Kerry James Marshall. I mean, if we carry anything forward in regards to Kerry and his work it’s just a pure love of painting and the whole of art history, but also Black self-determination. Then Darby writes this all-so-true observation saying this, “our moment is very much about stories, arguably, too much about them.” I fully agree with this, especially the easily digestible and easily transactional narratives shaping so much contemporary painting. Then, in his observation about your work, Darby writes, “Here the observer’s work rebegins: to consider Price as an artist-in-full, to hold his story in mind with and apart from the flat fictions on the wall, wherein place, color, and position engender problems story won’t resolve, at least not truthfully.” And I think that is such a beautiful summary of the work you are doing and the things that you’re thinking about—it is not to pull paintings together for easy transactions.

And it goes back to my first observations of the work, where the fluidity allows me to keep entering into them. I see where they stop, where they halt, where they break, where they move again. I can see moments of narrative, or figuration, or the social, I can see patterns of repetition. I can see symbols that reoccur—going back to that dashed line. They slay me. So in conclusion I want to ask, do your paintings express wishful thinking around the potential of painting itself? I agree with Darby’s assessment, but are they also generous, they’re open hearted as well as provocative.

Price: Oh yeah. They’re provocative, and I guess you could say they’re wishful too. That’s probably from the love, the joy, the happiness I feel getting to be a painter in 2024.