Ronald Walton in his Petersburg gallery (Photo by Ash Daniel)
On the third floor of the Walton Gallery building in downtown Petersburg, you’ll find Ronald J. Walton’s massive collage works created with heavy paper, gel and oil paint layered on canvases he stretched himself. Plastic boxes of paper human figures and abstract shapes sit stacked on the wood floor.
Horn-heavy jazz is playing from a corner television — it’s always playing, his son Eric says, shaking his head and smiling. At age 74, the artist is busy; he’s preparing for a solo show in Hawaii in early 2019 and a group show that will travel from Petersburg to Maryland.
“Red Pepper,” oil/paper on canvas, 12 by 10 inches
Ron Walton is the picture of what many think of as a modern artist — gray knit cap, loose jeans, a gallery sweatshirt and comfortable sneakers. He encourages a visitor to touch his paintings, to feel the textures. Lately, he’s used cardboard, acrylic paint and plastic applesauce containers in his pieces. Some have rich blasts of color while others are monochromatic. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts owns one of Walton’s works, and he’s shown his pieces all over the country. He also created and coined the “rollcubistic” method of creating human shapes with spheres.
“I listen to good music and get my inspiration off that,” Walton says. “People, the time of day. It just depends on my mood and how things flow.”
His relationship with jazz goes back to his childhood in Manhattan. Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis lived on his street, and Walton and his siblings often visited the big jazz clubs of the day with their father.
His grandfather owned a paint store and gave 7-year-old Ron an easel and some paints, which sparked his love of art. One of his primary influences is the late artist Romare Bearden, who co-founded Spiral, a 1960s African-American art collective in Harlem.
For Eric, the love of art was not immediate. “His art is all over the place,” he says of his childhood home in Brooklyn. “It still is. I guess just being with him, I learned the business.” After graduating from Virginia State University, Eric decided to stay in Petersburg. He worked first for HON Office Furniture in Chesterfield before opening Walton Gallery in 2009, which he runs full time.
Today, the first floor is a brightly lit gallery of changing exhibits — typically pieces by regional artists. Ron’s work occasionally appears, but Eric says he doesn’t want the gallery to be only about his father.
Ron still spends time in Brooklyn, where his mother — who’s in her 90s — lives, but he and wife Sibyil increasingly live in Petersburg. The small city is “very inspirational,” he says.
Brooke Ann Inman, “On Fire,” 2018, 11 by 14 inches, screen print
Don't Miss: Brooke Ann Inman’s “In love.” exhibition in Quirk's Main Gallery. Inman’s work, which stems from the desire to connect with others and nature, is a fusion of rudimentary writing and drawing, printmaking techniques, collecting and installation.
July 12-Aug. 26. 207 W. Broad St., 804-340-6036 or quirkgallery.com.
