Hopping the Fence | Interview: Walt Hall

Hopping the Fence | Interview: Walt Hall

It’s 3am and Walt Hall is Busy…

In a dim industrial pocket of the San Fernando Valley, Walt Hall’s Sappy Studio buzzes with music. Arrays of paintings in various states of completion line the walls and shelves in every direction. With this many original pieces together, it’s easy to see his consistent, raw, urban outsider style. On closer inspection, it’s the variations that really impress.

With a full plate of group shows and the featured artist slot at Gallery Row hotspot The Hive Gallery in March, Walt runs his large studio more like a small factory. About his work ethic, the artist says simply, “The galleries I’ve been able to show at have been real supportive, so I’d like to be able to kick ass for them all.”

Toward this effort, Walt regularly tramps through the dodgy back alleys surrounding his studio for seemingly useless discarded items. Wood comes as gifts from friends, gallery owners, even collectors. Countless boxes of obscure collage elements suggest years of collection. This is a place he can really stretch out and work the way he has to. “To be able to have this space helped me a lot, it kind of fell into my lap a couple of years ago…at just the right time.”

From Robotech to Rauschenberg.

Raised in Sunland, just blocks from where development ended and the foothills began; Walt grew up in “a very Huck Finn world.” Sadly, by the time he reached high school, the foothills were losing ground to encroaching progress. With a boundless world disappearing around him, he burned loads of creative energy teaching himself to draw from comic books and actively playing in many local bands.

Unable to afford art school, he studied European History at Cal State Northridge. He met his wife there, and engaged in intensive field studies at Gettysburg and Normandy. “I could be teaching history right now. I could have easily gone in a different direction. In the future, who knows?”

While in school, Walt got a job in art restoration. “It was my job, but it was my materials and applications study instead of art school.” In his spare time, Walt started to paint. “I studied painting by studying other painters: Dalí, Picasso, post impressionists, Dadaists, German expressionists, on up to Robotech and the Clayton Brothers. A guy like Rauschenberg always caught my eye. Trying to break your own ground with that kind of approach is hard.”

The Big, Empty House.

Walt’s earliest exhibitions were DIY curation projects at Noho Arts District coffee shops. He gained confidence as an artist, networked, and absorbed enough about the business to decide to focus on his art full time.

Suddenly, Walt’s parents sold the very house he had grown up in. During a three month escrow, he lived in his empty childhood home and converted the kitchen into a studio. He credits this period as profoundly transformative. “To be painting in this big, empty house that I grew up in…it was weird. It was the first time I was able to stretch out like that, and everything just started to fall together. In that particular moment, all of a sudden, I found my thing… That was the turning point for me.”

Influence from this period is evident throughout the studio. It’s in the playful, articulate language of the work. It’s in the way he gives the post war utopian childhood of yesteryear an eerily alluring melancholy. It’s in the ensemble of enigmatic, comical beings that inhabit his work. Together with distressed woods and deteriorating collage elements, the paintings are a patchwork of familiar textures stirring universal psychological associations.

Hopping the Fence.

Most collected among Walt’s works are the “fence posts”. Usually sold in sets, the posts came by happenstance. “Preparing a show in 2006, I realized I had these very labor intensive paintings and wasn’t going to have anything affordable. I started painting on these fence posts that were just lying around because they were small, and I could just whip some stuff out and charge virtually nothing for them.” People responded.

“I’ve done like 500 in the last year.”

All the Buzz.

With over two years showing at The Hive, a successful installation there last year and a recent bump to residency status, what will Walt bring to the featured artist wall that we haven’t seen before? According to Walt, “The show will be centered around a huge four panel painting that is a window into the entire world of my work. The rest will be hung ‘intense salon style’ so the work becomes its own installation. It almost looks like some kind of weird construction, until the viewer gets up close and sees what the hell is going on.”

It’s 4am.

Walt turns up the stereo and returns his attention to the three paintings he was juggling before I arrived. I take another look around the Sappy Studio and head out as Walt paints, his head bobbing to the music, his brush chipping intensely at an ever-growing body of work.

Words: Jimmy Bleyer|F/Photo: Beth Dubber| Art