Walt Horton (1953-2010)

Walt Horton biography:

The son of Air Force officer Colonel Clarence Horton II and Ann French, Walt Horton was born in 1949. From an early age, he had a natural ability to make people smile, and it seemed almost inevitable that cartooning would become his first career. In 1968, Walt attended the University of Colorado on a track scholarship, where he met his future wife, Peggy. After one year, he decided that formal education was not for him. His real education as an artist would come through observation, persistence, hard work, and an innate propensity to draw.

Walt and Peggy married in 1970, and their family eventually grew to include two adventurous sons, Jesse and Benjamin. In the mid-1970s, the family left the United States for an extended period of missionary work in Brazil and Bermuda. Over the course of 17 years abroad, Walt became fluent in Portuguese and Spanish and developed a keen sensitivity to the features, expressions, gestures, and body language of the people around him. Those experiences would prove invaluable to his development as a cartoonist and, ultimately, as a sculptor.

The family spent many of those years in Bermuda, where Walt’s cartooning matured. He established a successful advertising business specializing in humorous illustration, developing a distinctive ability to capture personality and movement while continuing to make people laugh.

In 1993, during a family ski trip to Aspen, Walt stopped into a gallery and encountered a display of bronze sculpture, including several bronze children. The work sparked something in him. Although he had spent decades as a cartoonist and illustrator, he was inspired to return home and try his hand at creating sculpture himself. What began as an experiment quickly became a passion.

Walt brought the same sense of humor, observation, and love of character that had defined his cartooning into the three-dimensional world of bronze. Sculpture offered him a new way to make people smile, grin, and laugh out loud—and a new medium in which to explore movement, personality, and everyday human experience.

By this time, Walt and Peggy had returned to Colorado. For the next 15 years, his bronze sculpture was represented by galleries throughout the country. In November 2009, another dream became reality when Walt and Peggy opened their own gallery, Walt Horton Fine Art, in Beaver Creek, Colorado. The gallery features the work of many fine artists, but its emphasis has always been Walt’s bronze sculpture.

From cartoonist and illustrator to internationally experienced observer of human nature and accomplished bronze sculptor, Walt Horton has built his career around a simple but enduring idea: art should connect with people—and, whenever possible, make them smile.

Available sculpture:

Click on images to enlarge.

“Bearfoot”
Walt Horton
bronze #16/50
49″ H x 36″ W x 20″ D
$9,500

See additional information about “Bearfoot”.

Interested in this sculpture, call us 602-730-2451 or email us sales@artzline.com.