About the artist
Ooowwee Walker
Lives and works in Houston, Texas.
Artist statement
Ooowwee Walker paints in public. One canvas takes him eight to ten hours, mostly oil, and he does it on the sidewalk, at the Galveston art walks, at markets and fairs, in front of whoever stops. His first art class was senior year of college, for extra credit. By early 2022 painting was the whole job.
The press reaches for Basquiat and Picasso, and fair enough. But the range is the point: a portrait built out of thousands of dots, a painting in nothing but blue, a gray one that gives up color altogether. There's a Scream in one of them if you look.
A lot of the canvases carry a number in the corner -- 25, 26 -- the same mark repeating across a run of work, a painting's way of saying when it happened.
The paintings that aren't on a wall yet live in a Houston storage unit, canvas after canvas, some taller than he is. The work does not stop to wait for rooms.
The work, up close
He knows exactly what he's doing
Nearly every canvas is held together by heavy contour -- black, white, or teal -- enclosing fields of saturated color the way lead came holds stained glass. Painting has a name for that logic, cloisonnism, coined for Gauguin's circle in the 1880s; he arrives at it by way of the street, where a picture has to read from thirty feet in bad light. Line is the structure. Color is the voltage.
The color knowledge is specific. Complements sit one field apart so they ring -- cadmium red against green, orange against cobalt -- then the black line steps in so the vibration never turns to mud. Skin goes non-local when the painting needs it: a deep blue face built from dots, a green bear, keeping company with strategies that run from Picasso's blue figures to Amy Sherald's gray ones. And twice in this catalog he gives color up on purpose -- one canvas in nothing but blue, one gray canvas that rations a single red -- the oldest proof in painting that the drawing can stand on its own.
The marks change job to job. A portrait built from thousands of divisionist dabs that mix in your eye, the trick Seurat systematized, done freehand on a sidewalk. Impasto laid on like masonry until the paint throws its own shadow. Dry-brushed line that leaves the canvas tooth showing. Oil stick scrawled over acrylic. All of it without preparatory drawing -- he starts with zero image in mind, by his own account -- so every structure was found during the hours of the session, in public, while people watched.
And there is a private alphabet: painted words with mirrored letters, the age-marks 25 and 26 dated into corners like cartouches, recurring suns, hearts, an open eye set in a raised palm. A Munch Scream shows up as a vase. A scribbled Basquiat crown sits on a self-portrait. The references are worn lightly, but they are references -- the canvases keep their own records.
In the room
The archive
A storage unit in Houston holds the rest of the work -- wall after wall of big canvases. This is thirty seconds of walking past it.
Selected record
Press
- The Leader, January 2024
- “Ooowwee: Street smart artist paves his path on the sidewalk” -- profile by Stefanie Thomas
Appearances
- Vibrant Soles Exhibition
- group show -- My Kicks on the wall
- Galveston Art Walk
- recurring
- Houston sidewalk sessions
- 2022 to now, eight-to-ten-hour canvases painted live
- Markets and fairs
- live painting and booth, ongoing
Education
- Self-taught painter
- B.S. Computer Science, finished anyway
Get in touch
Acquisitions, commissions, shows: the fastest line to him is the one he actually answers.