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| WALTER HORAK Early Years While I can readily trace my creative roots back to action-filled, childhood drawings of heroes and villains, my art and aesthetics were crucially shaped by years of painting and drawing in high school and later by formal studies of art history at Harvard University. During those early years I seriously pursued athletics as well. Whether I was a participant or spectator, sport had a powerful aesthetic appeal and was clearly linked to my art at the time. In parallel fashion, my efforts as a young painter or art historian invariably favored artistic imagery, realistic or abstract, which had expressive energy or lively passages of forms. To this day, I perceive an essential affirmation of life - and an expression of my own life - in simple movement and gesture. Career in Sculpture My commitment to sculpture as a profession properly began in 1972 at the Rhode Island School of Design where I studied with Arnold Prince, a sculptor and dancer from the West Indies. The potent element of figurative gesture in Arnold’s work, together with the sheer physicality of carving wood and stone, struck a resonant chord with the artist/athlete in me. Extracting sculptural form from an otherwise motionless, obdurate material was an irresistible challenge, so I began, then, as a carver, wresting human shapes from logs and stone. In the mid 1970’s I took my growing passion for wood and carving to a job as a frame-maker at an antique mill-museum in Arlington, Massachusetts. Exposure there to furniture makers and to techniques of joinery and wood lamination caused my work to become more open and attenuated. Referencing the movements of dancers and athletes, I sought postures for my sculpture that evoked something basic about the human condition: the yearning in the lean of a torso, life's transitions reflected in the fleeting turn of a head, and the compelling link between grace and power.
A return to graduate school (University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth)
for a Master of Fine Arts degree in the 90’s deepened my
focus. The yeasty atmosphere of an art school had the effect of
extending and amplifying my vision of the human figure, and I became
increasingly inspired by the similarities between the figure and
the shapes of other things: tree limbs, calligraphy, and myriad
organic and inorganic forms. The similarities made me think of
sculpture as metaphor-making in three dimensions. I worked again
with logs and tree parts and discovered bronze casting. |
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