I have always been inclined to let my work speak for itself, believing that should I need to explain it, I have perhaps failed. At the same time, I am excessively aware of my own curiosity about where other artists’ (visual artists, writers, composers, etc.) work is born and about the person who gave it life.

I was the second child of four born to a military family in Ottawa, the capital city of Canada. At the age of four, my family moved to an area that could only be described as very rural. I remember having an artistic talent as early as my first art class at school, when my grade one teacher held my work up as an example to which the other children should aspire. Despite my artistic talent I was determined to be an actor “when I grew up”. At the age of nineteen, I moved to Toronto, Canada to study theatre at university. Four years later I graduated from university, moved into my own apartment, and embarked on a career as an actor and, of course, waiter.

I remember feeling a strange sense of elation upon having survived childhood, a rural environment, education, and the knowledge that made my sexual orientation, (which was never a mystery or problem to me personally), would forever cause some people who never met me and would never know me, to hate me and others like me.

Life goes on. Within months of feeling this sense of peace (probably for the first time) a dinner conversation in a restaurant introduced me to a new word that would forever change my life and the lives of so many others: AIDS.

Life would never be the same again, and the importance of life (my own and others’) would be changed forever for me. I was surrounded by a plague that stigmatized gay people to a degree that actually exceeded that which we had already suffered. An overwhelming and paralyzing sense of fear, anger, sadness, and loss enveloped my life and the lives of so many others.

Being an actor suddenly meant very little to me. I felt powerless. I could not stop the dying or find a cure for the insidious disease. Maybe, just maybe, I could help find a cure for the hatred, fear, and ignorance that surrounded so many young men around the world as they lay in hospital beds and drew the last breaths of unfinished lives. I started to paint.

Slowly, sporadically, and privately I taught myself how to paint (previously I had only drawn) and began creating paintings about the things that all human beings share. Themes of love, attraction, hope, despair, loneliness, the beauty of sky, the perfection of a horizon, the power of a person touching another were given life on pieces of canvas. I created images that came from a place of truth. I tried to make sense of and give order to a world that seemed to know neither.

It simply never occurred to me to paint about themes in any other context than that of my own life as a person who happens to be gay. I had never had a problem relating to work created by heterosexuals in a heterosexual context. Why should I create paintings whose context was anything other than the truth of my life as a gay man?

I started showing my early paintings in gay bars and restaurants in the gay neighbourhood of Toronto. From there things moved very quickly. Within a short time I was exhibiting and selling my work in high end mainstream galleries throughout North America, and reproductions of my work throughout the world.

I see my work as a documentation, an interpretation, a crystallization of singular moments rendered in line, color, light, shadow, using a hundred brushes, a thousand colors, and a million brushstrokes. I strive to make people stop, if only a moment, think and actually feel something. My paintings contain as many questions as answers.

I hope that in its’silence, the body of my work has given a voice to my life, the lives of others, and in doing so, the dignity of all people.

Steve Walker
Toronto, Canada
May 25th, 2000