Quentin Walter has applied for, and won, grants and honors of which other artists dream. The ubiquitous artist makes an appearance at most of the art events along the Treasure Coast, and if you haven’t met her yet, your chance is near.
An exhibit of 24 of her “Fashionista Series” paper collages will be open this weekend at a downtown gallery, Art on 18th.
With imagery cut from fashion magazines and auction catalogs, Walter has created vignettes of an opulent world where thin, pouting women strut among a jumble of antique furnishings, classical art, gilded picture frames and jewelry – lots and lots of glittering bling.
The small collages, approximately 6 inches by 4 inches, are themselves like gems, set in shadow-box mats and surrounded by simple black frames.
“I’m not really a jewelry person,” says Walter. But in her collages, where layered images of luxe vie for the viewer’s attention, flashy display serves a purpose.
“The jewelry kind of tweaks them at the end,” she says.
The effect of the finished pieces is oddly formal; the collages rely on a certain symmetry of presentation that is reminiscent of a proscenium stage on which her figures are positioned, as though on an elaborate set.
Walter, who in years past was employed in the scenery department at Riverside Theatre, has just such a correlation in mind.
“I start the piece with a runway model, generally. Then I look through my various magazines, fashion magazines and Sotheby’s catalogs – and pull pieces to compliment and build the stage.”
The collages also speak to the closed, the intimate, the arcane. Their carefully chosen imagery and bell-jar preciousness are reminiscent of the self-conscious mysticism of a pack of Tarot cards.
In “Fashionista with Butterflies,” a woman in a transparent gray sheath strides purposefully toward the viewer. She is flanked by malachite panels; butterflies are arrayed around her, and at her feet a rich trove of jewels and objets d’art are arrayed like an offering. If nothing else, the woman in this artwork is an empress of worldly power and fecundity.
Walter’s own origins were couched in modest comfort. Her father was the principal of a vocational high school in the District of Columbia. He was 49 in 1948, when Quentin, the last of his five children, was born. Raised in Bethesda, MD, she was an eighth grader when the family moved to the tiny town – “It’s really just a crossroads,” Walter insists – of Philomont, Virginia where, in retirement, her father lived the life of a gentleman farmer, breeding Black Angus cattle.
Walter says that her career as an artist began in kindergarten; her first collages were created as a teen, when she made billboard-sized collages in the hallways of her high school. Her themes then ranged from football to the Vietnam War. Walter took her formal training in art at Western Washington University in Bellingham, where she was awarded a BA in 1981.
After that she lived in Harrisburg, Penn. for about ten years. Her regular attendance at jazz clubs in the region, as well as a trips to Jamaica and Martinique, inspired her to include the figures of musicians and musical symbols in her paintings.
Walter moved to Melbourne, Florida in 1995, where she became a member of the Fifth Avenue Art Gallery. A couple years later she met Weldon Stout, a painter and stained glass artist, and eventually moved into his house near Indian River Drive in Sebastian. Late in his life, they married; Stout died two years ago at the age of 94.
Life in Florida has, on the whole, been good to Walter’s art career. She received a $12,000 Pollack-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2000, and was an artist-in-residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach in 2001. In 2004 she enjoyed a solo show of her watercolors titled “Intimate Encounters” at the Vero Beach Museum of Art. Afterward Walter traveled the show to four art venues in Pennsylvania.
In 2008 Walter received her largest grant to date: an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb individual Artist’s Support Grant of $25,000.
She earned those awards on the strength of her watercolor paintings, which combine the untutored drawing style of folk art with surreal compositions. Like her collages, her painted pictures are packed with imagery and pulsing with color: purples, magentas, reds, blues and greens.
Her watercolors, she says, are done in her loose “signature style.” She deems her collages, with their photographic source material, “more realistic.”
But the artist has found that art on, and of, paper is not quite enough to satisfy her aesthetic itch. Only Walter’s self-referential brand of performance art can do that. Here and elsewhere she has become conspicuous for the personas she adopts to call attention not only to her artwork, but also to the continuing drama of her personal life.
As early as 2002 she attended the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair as her alter ego “Mercedes Devereau,” an international art star with a (fictitious) graduate degree from Yale. Donning a sandwich board with one of her framed paintings hanging from its front, she wandered the aisles of the fair, making herself as much as part of the event as the works that were officially on view. (The following year she paraded through the galleries of the Hirschhorn Museum in Washington, DC in a similar get-up.)
She has crashed each subsequent Art Basel Miami Beach in a different guise. One year she was a starving artist selling pencils for $5 a pop. In 2013, covered from head to toe in shiny gift bows, she was “Miss Bow: The Gift.” Last year she was “Tourist with Attitude,” a walking collage of contrasting fabrics, bangles, beads and a stuffed Mickey Mouse toy.
“The underpinning of that one was the relationship between Disney and the Christian religion,” says Walter. “They are both institutions.”
As is Quentin Walter herself, in our own local art scene.
Walter’s works will show concurrently with paintings by Nancy Dillen at Art on 18th gallery in the Twin Oaks Professional Center, 1864 18th Street, in downtown Vero. An opening reception for the shows will be held during Friday’s gallery stroll from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m.