EXHIBIT | COLUMBUS COLLEGE OF ART & DESIGN
Brushstrokes in flight
Stolen watercolors re-created in Ohio after loss in Argentina
By Jeffrey Sheban
THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH
Two versions of a scene from Argentina: top, as painted in the South American country; and, bottom, as re-created in Ohio
Two versions of a scene from Argentina: top, as painted in the South American country; and, bottom, as re-created in Ohio
Walter King
Walter King
A sketch that King drew for police in Argentina after a cabby drove off with his 70 watercolors
A sketch that King drew for police in Argentina after a cabby drove off with his 70 watercolors
Two years ago, Columbus artist Walter King was feeling on top of the world in the Southern Hemisphere.
Wandering the towns and villages of the Andes Mountains in Argentina, the professor at the Columbus College of Art & Design had finished the last of 70 watercolors painted during a seven-year period.
The "watercolor souvenirs," as he called the works, were his way of documenting the places he'd visited on four trips starting in 2000 - all co-sponsored by CCAD.
"It connects me more with where I am to sit and paint than to snap off a hundred photos," he said of the series.
The cultural-exchange trips were intended to raise the school's international profile, serve as inspiration for art students in Columbus and form the backbone of an exhibit of King's Argentine work.
Then, a funny thing happened on the way to the airport: King hailed a small-town cabby who really took him for a ride.
Pulling off the road in a quiet spot in Cordoba and feigning mechanical trouble, the driver asked the American to get out and push, ostensibly to help jump-start the engine.
When King stepped behind the vehicle, the engine roared to life. The driver sped off with nearly all of the artist's possessions - including his paintings.
"My suitcases!" King wailed in Spanish as the lime-green taxi disappeared.
"For a brief moment, I thought he would stop a few yards down the road," King wrote later on his artist's blog. "Then I rationalized that, because it was a one-way street, he would run around the block and come back for me. What an idiot. El stupido!"
To supplement his middling Spanish, the artist sketched a drawing for police of a man chasing a taxi. But, by then, the thief was long gone.
King, raised in Tulsa, Okla., and on the CCAD faculty since 1985, returned to Columbus and spent several months pondering the incident. He was less mad than disappointed - with the driver and his own naive behavior.
"I really didn't see the point in getting angry," he said. "The paintings were gone, and the thief didn't even realize what he was stealing."
The best way to move on, he concluded, was to re-create the series.
So, during a five-week stretch the next summer, King borrowed a friend's boat docked in a marina on Lake Erie. Half a world away from Argentina, King lived on the 36-foot sailboat and redid many of the paintings from memory and from photos taken before the theft.
"Those paintings were still in my head," said King, who has art degrees from CCAD and Boston University.
"I wanted to get them down on paper before they just drifted away."
The results are on display through Dec. 19 in a three-artist faculty exhibit in Canzani Center Gallery.
The paintings are intended to be not replicas of the originals but King's reinterpretation of his earlier work.
King's saga has been the talk of the private art school.
"That would be extremely hard to do," said Columbus artist and CCAD adjunct instructor Evangelia Philippidis.
"It's not just about the visuals, but to be able to capture the emotional essence of a place is an amazing feat," she said.
King is more than satisfied with his reprised works but still wonders what became of those lost pieces of his artistic soul. He hopes they've found a good home.
"Maybe there is a poor Argentine, living under a bridge, who has the most wonderful collection of watercolors tacked to the back of his crates."
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