By Lisa Hornung
Photos By Matt Johnson
If you start talking to Waller Austin about art, you’d better settle into a comfy chair. The Louisville-based artist for the past 30 years knows a lot and loves to talk about it.
He’ll tell you about the art he makes, his process and medium (mostly Crayola crayons), and he’ll give you a full-on art history lesson about his favorite artists and the ones he likes to “copy.”
His art is unique, thought-provoking, and sometimes jarring. Some of his recent work highlights gun safety for a pretty traumatic reason: His wife, Whitney, survived a mass shooting at Fountain Square in Cincinnati in 2018. Whitney Austin was shot 12 times and survived. That horrific event inspired the Austins to create an organization focused on responsible gun ownership and ending gun violence, lobbying for common-ground gun legislation: Whitney/Strong.
From that trauma came the desire to make smart change. “We do both community intervention and legislative work, both here in the state of Kentucky, also in Ohio, we’ve actually done partnerships helping the people in Tennessee and in Missouri, and we’ve done big national work, too,” Austin said. “We were actually a big part of getting the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act passed in June 2022. Our federal work began with lobbying for the Manchin-Toomey bill of 2019, which didn’t pass. That was the universal background checks bill.”
From the failure of that bill, the couple learned a lot about what people want and are willing to give, leading to the later success of the BiPartisan Safer Communities Act. “So, our whole family and our two kids were there, and it was just, you know, really unbelievable to see this gun safety law being passed after 28 years of nothing. So, with that, we’re very hopeful and grateful for people that will hear us.”
These days, Austin is shifting his focus back to his art. He said he is trying to do about 30% Whitney/Strong and 70% art. “I’m moving back across the line and into the art production as we speak,” he said.
Austin has had several professions in his life -- banker, house flipper, and more -- and realized he wanted to get back to his passion. So he enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied art alongside students more than 10years his junior. But, as he said, “It was just really crazy, I mean, really a surreal experience. But it was a lot of fun. And I wasvery productive; I got a whole lot of work done. And I’d never taken any art classes before. I wasn’t really taking studio art classes so much as art history, and kind of just learning the language of art really so that I could defend the work that I made.” From there, he entered graduate school and got an MFA at Washington University in St. Louis, before moving the family back to Louisville in 2018, where he taught art and art history for four years at Jefferson Community & Technical College.
Austin says he copies other artists, but not in the way you might think. He’s interested in certain artists, and he follows their style but with his own twist. Some artists he’s influenced by include Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Henry Darger, and many more.
While Austin uses Crayola to make art, it’s not in the way you would think. He melts the crayons and uses them to paint. He said he began when traditional art supplies began to make him ill, and he realized that crayons are non-toxic.
“When I was at art school in Chicago, I experimented with 25 different brands of crayon; so Mexican crayons, Indian crayons, Chinese crayons, crayons from Thailand,” he said. “You’ve got your Up&Up crayons that are from Target, I can’t remember what the Walmart crayons are called. But ultimately, I found that Crayola crayons are the best because they just have the highest pigment-to-wax ratio. So they have a much higher melting point. They’re much more stable, and the colors are more vibrant.”
Austin is still working on Whitney/Strong while he raises a family and remodels their old home in the Highlands. “I am very interested in making art and, obviously, making art and having a family and a mortgage requires collectors and investors.”
Many people in the greater Louisville area buy his art, but “Louisville is a pretty conservative town,” he said. “I don’t do a lot of pastoral, bucolic scenes, you know, I don’t do a lot of horses. I actually did an anthropomorphic horse. I don’t know if you’ve heard of ‘Bojack Horseman.’ It is currently on display at the Galt House.”
Austin updates his website quite regularly, www.walleraustin.com, and many featured works are available for sale.
“It’s also just good for your psyche, too, that people appreciate what you do. It keeps me making these things. Everyone should have original artwork on display in their home and or office.”
Comentarios