Eric Walsky was born in Anchorage Alaska. The son of an American father and a Swiss mother, he grew up in Alaska and spent the summers of his childhood in Switzerland. Always inclined toward art from a young age, he pursued another passion and succeeded in becoming a professional ice hockey player, playing professionally for 10 years between North America and Europe. His first professional contract started with the Vancouver Canucks and he finished his career in Switzerland where he now resides.
In his early years, he explored furniture design and later transitioned into sculpture at the age of 19. Very much inspired by Donald Judd and the minimalists, his sculptures are monoliths several meters tall constructed primarily from concrete, with details of steel and wood, stained with acid.
It was not until Walsky’s university years at Colorado College that he began painting. He enrolled in somedrawing courses but was never drawn to developing his art in an academic environment. He found an alternative and began to paint in his aunt’s studio, who is a lifelong painter and a resident of Colorado Springs.
His style was and continues to be influenced by the period of Abstract Expressionism from America in the1940’s. Throughout his professional hockey career, he continued to paint and refine his personal aesthetic. During this period his aim was to explore and execute his voice as an artist. Due to the commitment to his athletic career he rarely exposed his works and finally when he believed his paintings were of a quality sufficient to expose, he did so in a very successful exhibition in Geneva, Switzerland in 2013.
Eric Walsky retired from professional ice hockey in April of 2018 due to a career ending injury and has since dedicated himself to his artistic career.
His work is meant to evoke emotion, through its composition and color he creates weight, balance, disbalance, and depth. His aim and challenge is to create something honest, believing that people are not so different from one another and by successfully achieving an honest work, people will be able to relate and react to it in a powerful way. All his work induces an immediate emotional response, giving way to subtleties and complexities that later come to light.
Walsky likes to work in large formats, “ I like the viewer to feel as if he can step inside the painting.” This is also true regarding the question of living with large pieces, “ With large paintings more sothan small paintings even when you are not directly looking at them they become and contribute to your theenvironment, it adds an intangible element into the setting.”
ARTIST STATEMENT
“I’m interested in representing the dichotomy of how things are and how we are- both simple and complex. The underlying theme is always balance and balance doesn’t exist without some sort of tension. I want my paintings to have this equilibrium and to capture the right mood. I want to show the bold and subtle, light and heavy, the simple and complex, and finally want the end result to have an emotional impact.
I paint because painting confronts me with things I don’t yet understand and that I feel compelled to resolve. My process is simple: each painting presents me with a series of evolving problems and a painting is done when there is nothing left to fix. Through this process I am in pursuit of capturing something honest to myself and to capture something honest I must go through the process of confronting problems.
I have difficulty with the over intellectualization of art. I believe a painting must be able to stand alone and allow the intellectual aspect to be secondary. A painting must be honest and for a painting to be honest it must be imperfect. I hope those who live with my paintings will discover that an inadvertent relationship develops and just as human relationships it will continuously evolve. If the intellectual supersedes the emotive the relationship risks being superficial. I want the relationship with my paintings to be genuine.”