Walter Askin graduated from U.C. Berkeley with a Masters Degree in Art in 1952. He was named Calmerton Scholar in Art, had his first one person show at the De Young Museum and was an Assistant Curator at the Legion of Honor Museum while still a student.
Walter Askin has had one person shows at the Kunstlerhaus in Vienna, Austria; the Hellenic American Union in Athens, Greece; a U.S. Information Agency Traveling Exhibition in the former Yugoslavia; the Pasadena, La Jolla, and Santa Barbara Museums of Art; has shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York; and has had many museum and university shows.
He has served on the boards of the Pasadena Art Museum, the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, the Graphic Arts Council of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and Baxter Art Gallery at Cal Tech; was First Vice President of the National Watercolor Society, President of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society, arts representative to the Academic Council of the College Board in New York; member of the Commission on the Future of the Advanced Placement Program of the College Board; Chair of the Visual Arts Selection Committee of the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts and the Commission on Presidential Scholars.
He was a Professor of Art at California State University, Los Angeles where he received the Outstanding Professor Award, also taught at U.C. Berkeley on several occasions, CSU Long Beach, the Universities of Hawaii and New Mexico, and was an Adjunct Professor in the Visual Arts Research Institute at Arizona State University; has been a lecturer at many other universities and colleges of art including the Irish Academy of Art in Dublin, the U.S. Embassy in Ballsbridge, Ireland, and many in Australia.
A number of elements came to play in his work - figures, objects, a sense of place/a context, as well as symbolic forms and even a sense of humor. As his visual vocabulary became more extensive, his involvement with a wide range of media and collaboration with master printers (at Kelpra studios in London and Tamarind lithography in New Mexico), foundries, and even various industrial fabrication plants liberated his imagery even further. Today, viewers find his work easily identifiable as coming from his hand - but he is free to use this extensive roster of formal, expressive, and personal material to create a variety of intents. His work is now melodic and harmonic in nature. He is involved with ideas that focus on delectation, delight, sublimation, sensuosity and joy, sparking exultation and mystery.
“What can we do today that has any kind of meaning and value? We can search for a means to escape from conventions, from ordinariness, and from the limitations of everyday existence. We can help create the emergent fiction that is the world we live in. We can regenerate the key myths and archetypes so that life doesn't seem worth living unless one is on the side of the liberating and transformative. We can learn to play again - to not know what we are looking for, to break through the ice of habit, to know what it means to be truly alive and to experience the specialness of even the most ordinary things. We can find the god within, inspiration, magic, once again be visionaries, bring peace.
The real joy is in making a better, more calm, more serene, more alive, more playful, more energized, more focused, more directed, more life filled existence for the time we're here."
---Walter Askin
The Kelpra Studios screenprint “Bruegel Britannia” includes a redrawing of Breugel’s “The Alchemist” along with Walter’s rendition of British character types indigenous to Britannia St where Chris Prater of Kelpra Studios printed with Walter.
