By Scott D. Johnston

Ocean Shores artist Larry J. Walden was in the third grade in Ft. Worth, TX, “when it occurred to me that being an artist was something that I could do. I discovered my love of art as a little boy going to museums and galleries with my parents. My mother was an accomplished artist who taught and encouraged me.”

On the surface, his gently glowing landscapes in oil, his favorite subject and medium, may seem at odds with a life’s journey that successfully mixed several years of serious art studies at a very high level, running a “boring business,” a career in law enforcement, and martial arts expertise. For Walden, who celebrates his 70th birthday this month, the thread through all of this is learning and practicing the fundamentals until applying them becomes second nature.

Area art aficionados can view several examples of Walden’s work at the Fall Gala exhibition that runs through Dec. 7 at the John Spellman Library at Grays Harbor College in Aberdeen. The show, in its 25th year, features 24 area artists, many of them members of Associated Arts of Ocean Shores, which helped produce the event. More information about the Fall Gala can be found online at www.ghc.edu/news/25th-annual-fall-art-gala. Walden’s art can also be seen at Fusions Gallery, 834 Point Brown Ave. NW, in Ocean Shores.

After high school graduation in 1965, Walden did a stint in the U.S. Air Force, where he was an air policeman, and spent a couple years in Southeast Asia where he studied martial arts.

In 1973, he was admitted to the Art Students League of New York, an institution begun by art students in 1875, that has counted many accomplished artists among its faculty and students, and currently has an average enrollment of about 2,500 student artists. He completed a four-year certificate program and was elected as the student member of the school’s board of directors for three of those years, the most allowed.

What drew him there was the opportunity to study “the highest level of fundamentals.” One of his primary instructors was Frank Mason, who taught art for over half a century, and “was considered like, Rubens reborn… so I studied with a guy who understood the old masters.

“And the drawing teacher could draw the entire skeleton, and all the muscles, from memory.” Robert Beverly Hale “was a genius with anatomy, and I was his monitor, so I was with him quite a bit.

“I wanted to study the old masters… that depth, that three-dimensionality, the feeling of air, of space, the light actually hitting things and coming off… it’s miraculous… and they could do that because they had the technique of the art… the materials they used and how they used them, put them at a different level. And these guys (Mason and Hale) knew that.”

For Walden, the combination of artistic education and experience eventually brought him to “that point where the technique is transcended by the heart or the soul, and it’s not a thought process any more. If I didn’t understand the methods and materials and hadn’t practiced them all the time, I would never be able to get into that place where something better than just my knowledge takes over.”

He describes himself as “a realist painter” and “a modern luminist. Like Inness, Moran, Hurley and others, the interplay of light, a luminous atmosphere and color are what fascinate me.”

Although he also paints with watercolors and pastels, he mostly works in oil because “it has the most possibilities for what I’m talking about, doing something that isn’t just technique, it’s transmitting something from the real you.”

Following four years at the Art Students League of New York, he worked different jobs until he moved to Tacoma in 1981 to take over his dad’s business, “a billing service before the age of computers.” In 1987, he went back into law enforcement with the U.S. Department of Defense, based in Bremerton, but with job assignments as diverse as Maine and Hawaii. In 2007, after he and his wife, Shirley, grew weary of five years in Maine, he took a reduction in rank to return to what was essentially his old job in Bremerton. For the next three years, until his retirement in 2009, he rented a small apartment and commuted on weekends to the home they had bought in Ocean Shores. Walden usually has several paintings going at once, and he continually finds a wide variety of subjects out here that arouse the interest of the artist that has always been a part of him.

They’ve been thoroughly enjoying life on the North Coast ever since.