For an older generation of artists, serving in the military was a fairly common experience, one shared by Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and others.
These days, the contemporary painter Walter Price’s stint in the Navy makes him something of an outlier.
The experience informs his work, and it is one of several elements that gives Price a distinct profile in today’s art world, as does his particular literary take on naming his works and his shows.
Price’s paintings plumb the zone where figuration melts in and out of abstraction, and the color blue is his most frequently employed hue, but it is not necessarily used to imply melancholy.
“You do four years in the Navy, and you see a lot of blue water,” said Price, standing in his studio in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn. “The neighborhood I grew up in, people wore a lot of blue, too. But also it’s just like a color I like.”
He added, “It’s the most forgiving color for a painter, I would say. You can get away with a lot with blue.”
Price is a ball of tightly coiled energy. He was wearing a track suit with a swirling blue and green pattern, a palette that matched his paintings, and during an hourlong interview he declined to sit. Not far from the many stacks of paintings in his studio were some weights, part of his training regimen.
“I set a goal before I turn 40 years old,” said Price, who is 37 and lives in the Bed-Stuy area of Brooklyn. “I should be bench-pressing 225 pounds.”
He is just as ambitious with his work, and some results of that drive are on view this month, in a show of 36 works at the Hong Kong branch of David Zwirner gallery, “Pearl Lines,” running Tuesday to May 9.
One of the works is a striking field of umbrella shapes, repeated with varied colors, titled “It has to rain before you can see where all the leaks are at,” (2025).
Such repetition “exhausts” the image, Price said — and he meant that in a good way. “It’s a way to take something that’s figurative and push it into abstraction,” he said.
The title of the work is from a passage in Octavia E. Butler’s science fiction novel “The Parable of the Sower.” Writerly references abound for Price; he’s a big fan of classical Russian novelists like Dostoyevsky, too. He often paints a word or phrase on the thin edge of a painting, nudging viewers to get up close and peer around the side if they want to read it.
On the edge of one work in the Hong Kong gallery show, he painted “Resistance is key!”
The dealer David Zwirner said that when he first saw a work by Price in 2022, in a show at his gallery curated by the writer Hilton Als, he made an incorrect assumption.
“I was sure I was looking at an older artist who had been working for many years,” Zwirner said. (The artist himself said that it happened a lot because Walter Price was “an old man’s name.”)
At this week’s Art Basel Hong Kong fair, Zwirner’s booth features Price’s 2024 painting “The sudden laughing intimacy of the streets.”
For that work, Price employed paint and also drew with a chrome pen, as drawing is a foundational part of his practice. The base of the painting is not canvas but wood.
“I like the hard surface,” Price said. “You can collage, you can draw, and you can add more gesture and mark-making on it.”
Generally Price’s smaller works are on wood, which he uses about 80 percent of the time, he said, with larger compositions going on canvas; he enjoys making less-big works because the constraints force creativity.
“Small works can have a very big impact,” he said. “When it’s smaller, you need more to create razzle-dazzle to get people to see the work as something more than just intimate.”
Compact pieces also come in handy as Price has no assistants.
“I wouldn’t make a painting that’s too big for me to carry myself,” he said, demonstrating his wingspan by putting his arms around a work on canvas he had nearby.
Price had a solo show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2024 called “Pearl Lines,” which is the same title as the Zwirner gallery show. Price’s interest in repetition goes beyond just images. Most of his shows have been titled “Pearl Lines.”
“With beautiful words, sometimes things need to be repeated,” Price said of the poetic reuse, but then he declined to explain further. “It has a personal meaning for me, but I don’t want to put that in The New York Times.” He laughed.
Price does not mind poking his viewers a little. Two of the works in his studio showed some leering white men looking at what he called a “cartoony butt,” disembodied and in a box. In one of the paintings, the butt was silver, and in the other, gold.
Price said the work was about misogyny on the part of all men, and added that “as a Black person, it’s interesting to be painting pink people. I want to see what I can provoke out of you.”
Rosario Güiraldes, the curator of the Walker show, said that Price has a “mischievous” streak.
Güiraldes said she was impressed that he did not have “a conventional road to an art career.” She added, “Nothing prevented him from pursuing what he wanted. He was not taking no for an answer.”
Price was raised in Macon, Ga. “I grew up a typical small town person with big dreams,” he said. Although his family did not have a lot of money, he said the circumstances were not “sad poor.”
After graduating from high school, he went into the Navy, working as both a cook and a fireman. Both jobs contributed to mastering the “nonverbal communication” of painting, he said, including the dexterity for “working the small areas” of a painting. Then he studied at the Art Institute of Washington and Middle Georgia College, using the G.I. Bill and getting an associate of arts degree from the latter institution.
Price was dead set on moving to the big city to pursue art. One of his recurring and repeating motifs is the rounded arm of a cozy upholstered sofa or armchair. To Price, it is a painterly manifestation of a piece of advice from the pastor and motivational speaker Eric Thomas about getting comfortable with being uncomfortable.
“I listened to that every day for a year before moving to New York City, because it was such a big thing,” Price said of Thomas’s line. “I needed to pump myself up.”
Once he moved to New York, Price bused tables and worked as an art handler before he started getting traction showing his work. He said that in his early years, he was innocent about how the art world treats success.
“I was naïve,” Price said. “I never thought about how people can be insecure and compare themselves. I became more jaded. It snapped me out of my little dream world.”
Now Price is enough of a known quantity that he actually has three galleries; in addition to Zwirner, he shows with Greene Naftali and Modern Art.
Some artists get stressed out if various dealers are asking them for work at the same time, but Price has a forthright approach that Zwirner characterized as “going right at the art world like an athlete playing in a league.”
Price said he feels comfortable with the game as it is. “I don’t feel pressure,” he said. “It’s a privilege to be here as a painter, and for my dream to come true is all I could ask for.”
The post A Navy Veteran Finds His Niche in the Art World appeared first on New York Times.
