“It’s the mystery that lasts and not the explanation.”
Henry J. Seldis, Los Angeles Times: “Walter Askin has created a personal mythology and symbology that strikes chords of empathy as well as enigma. There ia a good deal of humor here but no flippancy. There is compassion in Askin’s irreverence. He emerges as a brilliant colorist who manages to combine highly stylized formalisms with a very personal kind of fantasy directed at puncturing pomp and circumstance wherever it exists. Certainly this exhibition supports my opinion that he is among our leading artists. His skillful expression of compassion and humor make his works extraordinarily rewarding.”
“Founders Rock”
Dr. Thomas W. Leavitt, Director, Herbert F. Johnson Museum Cornell University, Ithaca, New York: “Walter Askin Is absolutely and passionately dedicated to his visions as an artist. And they are beautiful. Like Askin’s speech, they are suggestive, nudging us toward understanding with humor and compelling structure.”
“Song of Mrs. Murphy.”
Dr. Stephen Prokopoff, Director, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Massachusetts – “Metaphor is the cornerstone of Walter Askin’s art, offering us an immediate sense of the capacity for transformation inherent in events and objects. Askin’s forms are read as symbols, though their specific meanings frequently evade precise description. This uncertainty is intensified in conjunctions of symbols that subvert conventional logic. Often these conjunctions are oblique, creating partially overlapping meanings that simultaneously elucidate and suggest alternative possibilities. Askin’s dramas enact ceremonies described not in the logic of words and grammar but rather apprehended as in a dream. In the theatre of imagination, there is no passage of time; everything happens at once, and in Askin’s art, too, rituals are captured that trace the movements of a gifted and individual mind and sensibility.”
