Dugald Stewart Walker

I found Dugald Stewart Walker’s work yesterday while I was digging around for Kubla Khan paintings and illustrations. Murphy’s Law, now perhaps more widely understood thanks to Cooper in Interstellar, means exciting things sometimes too, like that the art you wish existed does actually exist, and Walker’s work is proof of that for me. It was also a funny milepost for how far we’ve come since early February as Walker’s work reminds me a lot of Francois Schuiten’s work we talked about back in this post, and I’ve only gone much further down the micro-database rabbit hole since then.

Given that Walker was from Richmond, VA it’s not surprising to me that he managed to earn international fame while remaining unpopular or unnoticed in his own town. Most Virginians have a deep, religious love for their own misremembered past and if something modern appears to be swimming against the local narrative current it’s usually either purposefully misinterpreted, or prayed against, or both. I would wager that there are fewer places on earth which have logged more complaints with God’s customer service department than the stretch of land that runs from Richmond to Bristol, and it wouldn’t be surprising to me if it’s also caused most of the delays surrounding the release of His second book.

Back to Dugald though, I thought his work was wonderful and I discovered that he illustrated a famous edition of Hans Christian Anderson fairy tales and a collection of historical mega poems called Rainbow Gold, whose cover artwork featured the piece I included yesterday.

I’ve put some more of his work below for you to peruse, and I’m looking into the copyright stuff around his artwork to see what sort of breathing room there is. I think it’d be amazing to make his prints available for sale via some print and frame company and am going to see what I can find out. If any of you know someone who loves to print and frame things or can point me in the right direction please let me know. Favorite titles from these pieces are “She tied my boat to the North Star so I would not grow up while she was gone.” and “Comet Lady”, hopefully referring to the same person.