Perspectives: M. Douglas Walton

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As a child, the artist M. Douglas Walton suffered from a speech disorder that made it impossible for him to pronounce consonants. Faced with the casual brutality that only other children can inflict upon a “different” child, Walton sought safety in silence; he did not speak for fourteen years. “I had no friends, no acquaintances. In school I never went on recess,” he said—his diction still showing traces of one used to communicating in ways that don’t involve speaking. “I lived in a world of my own; it was everyone else who lived in a false, superficial world.” 

Of course, Walton did eventually learn to speak, when his parents moved the family to Wichita, Kansas, so their child could attend an institute that specialized in speech disorders. But the artist remembers being content in his silent world. “As a child I developed a strong observational capacity,” he recalled. “I saw the minutest detail and beauty that was everywhere. Once I did learn to speak, the bigger problem became, what do you say?”

The answer, improbably, turned out to lie behind the teacher’s podium. After university he moved to Shreveport, where he worked as an architect until two critical events took place. The first was that he took a painting class with the master watercolorist Edgar Whitney. The second came in 1972, when Walton was offered a position as an assistant professor of architecture at Louisiana Tech, where to his surprise, he discovered that he was born to teach. Something in the act of teaching opened a new conduit to expression, and the words Walton struggled to articulate in daily life flowed freely. “When I was teaching I could simply speak and the words came,” he said. “The Balinese believe that if you’re open then the universal energy comes in. Then you can be highly creative and able to speak on a high level, because words are not conscious words, but form in the subconscious. From then on I concentrated on teaching, rather than just painting.” 

For forty years Walton has taught artists to see the world differently, leading small groups on international trips in search of artistic inspiration. Typically his pupils are people in their fifties through their seventies, whom he thinks are more receptive to the notion of an unseen world beyond that which is immediately apparent. How can Walton tell if an artist is a candidate for this kind of painting? “If they comment on that which others would never notice. If they pause to pick up a leaf, or notice a shadow, or comment on the cloud relationships, then they’re ready,” he said. “In Bali, people are born into that.”

That fascination with the Balinese culture’s way of seeing the world has led Walton and his painting students back to Bali twenty-nine times over the years. But it was on a different journey, to Nepal, that the artist saw the conduit to a higher energy open to its fullest extent. On April 25, 2015, Walton and thirteen students were crossing the Friendship Bridge between Nepal and Tibet when the magnitude 8.1 Gorkha Earthquake struck, killing some nine thousand people. He and his students spent several days on a remote slope in the Himalayas. “Boulders bigger than cars came down all around us. Several Nepalese lost their lives,” he recalled. “But the amazing thing was we saw no unhappiness, then or afterwards! People moved onward—from destruction to construction. Within hours they were feeding the five thousand with great joy and happiness.” As an artist focused less on connecting with the physical world and more on capturing its energy and spirit, Walton found this experience changed him forever. “After the earthquake, I came to see that my paintings needed to be performances. The magnitude showed me that they had to be big—ten feet, twenty feet. But at the same time I found myself simplifying my compositions to make them more poetic.” With his non-objective paintings, once again Walton found himself able to transcend the physical world and reach for the universal energy that he first perceived as a soundless, solitary child. 

In 2017, Shreveport’s Artspace presented more than one hundred of Walton’s Nepal paintings in the exhibit Quake in Paradise. Expansive in scale, rendered in bold slashes of color suggestive of unrestrained energy, many left powerful impressions upon their viewers. “The painting ‘Haven’ produced tears, which made me understand that you can paint on a high emotional level on which you get a reaction from the public, without them having any pre-knowledge of the subject,” he said. “I think that’s the message in my paintings: that there’s more to life than the physical world, and we have to catch up to that. There’s a beauty beyond that of the physical world that is simply awesome.”  

Find more works by M. Douglas Walton on Facebook. This month, Walton will be profiled on LPB’s Art Rocks, the weekly showcase of visual and performing arts hosted by Country Roads publisher James Fox-Smith. Tune in Friday, March 23 at 8:30 pm, or Saturday, March 24 at 5:30 pm, across the LPB network. lpb.org/artrocks.

This article originally appeared in our March 2018 issue. Subscribe to our print magazine today.