“Some areas of my paintings are really tough to look at, and some areas are beautiful,” says Milwaukee artist Shane Walsh. “I want the whole experience of what it feels like to be alive to come through.”
The son and only child of the former head of the Mercury Marine design department, Walsh grew up in a house filled with art. “I knew I wanted to be an artist,” the 47-year-old tells me at a Brady Street coffee shop. “I didn’t know what that would look like. I just assumed that there was going to be a place for artists in the world.”
After graduating from MIAD and getting an MFA at the University of Washington, he returned to Milwaukee for part-time teaching opportunities at MIAD, UWM, and UW-Washington County.
“I was stumbling around, pasting together the adjunct teaching gigs,” he says. “Sometimes I’d have to teach at all three schools in a single day. When you first start out, you have to be willing to do that. I would meet people and make connections in the local art world. Through perseverance and effort, I was able to get some things to happen.”
Walsh had showings at the Portrait Society Gallery in the Third Ward and at Alice Wilds in Walker’s Point (his Milwaukee gallery today). He continues to teach painting and drawing part time at UWM — four courses each semester, with students ranging from sophomores through grad school.
“Milwaukee’s a great place to live because it’s affordable,” he says. “But like many places, it doesn’t have the infrastructure to support art full-time. There aren’t enough collectors here. You need access to other cities and other markets.”
And so his primary gallery now is the Aysa Geisberg Gallery in the Tribeca area of New York, where Walsh had a two-month show of new work there in November and December.
Walsh shares a studio in Brooklyn with friends. “I’d crash there for a week at a time when I went to see shows and meet people at open studio events,” he explains. “That’s how I met the people at Aysa Geisberg, and nurturing that relationship over a decade led to representation.”
That exposure and networking is critical for an artist, he says. “It’s knowing what the different art worlds look like, where you see yourself, and then making the effort to be part of it,” Walsh notes. “It’s also commitment to studio practice. Nothing else matters if you don’t make awesome work and don’t love what you do.”
His abstract paintings are “a multi-vocal kind of paint handling,” he says. “The history of abstract painting is in them. The question is, how to take that history and make it my own?
“I knew I wanted to make paintings that didn’t need justification from an outside reference in order to feel real,” he says. “They were personal in terms of the things I loved, like the visual culture I was exposed to in my teens when everything is exciting and fresh. I tried to capture that first moment of coming into the world as a conscious, aware, visual omnivore. For me, that happened in the late 1980s to early 1990s — cartoons, graphics, skateboard culture, graffiti culture, MTV.”
Looking ahead toward summer, Walsh and three like-minded organizers will partner with the Peninsula School of Art to open
Door Country Contemporary, the first contemporary art fair in Wisconsin. The June 6-9 event in Fish Creek will showcase 22 regional galleries and will be modeled after the Untitled Art Fair in Miami. “There’s a hunger for contemporary work to be shown and celebrated in that area, so we thought this is the perfect setting,” Walsh says. “It also shows off also the wonderful nature of Wisconsin.” MKE