Resilience: The Life History and Grand Canyon Art of Curt Walters

A career retrospective and biography of one of our foremost Grand Canyon painters.

In the arts of the American West, two names are inextricably linked: Curt Walters and Grand Canyon. Documenting Walters’ career as a master painter of one of the Seven Natural Wonders of the World, author dDamien Foreman provides intimate and honest insights into the artist’s life and five-decade career. Walters’ passion and philosophy, his challenges and triumphs, are woven into an emotional narrative related in both words and oil paintings arranged to illustrate the narrative of his life and the evolution of his matchless style and technique. From a sensitive, dyslexic childhood in rural New Mexico to his award-winning stature today, Walters found that every choice he made, every trail he took, and every canvas he painted always led back to Grand Canyon. Resilience tells a story profoundly unique yet infinitely relatable--both worldly yet deeply personal.

dDamian Foreman is Curt Walters’ grandson and follows in the family’s artistic traditions. First published at age twelve, he won two scholarships for acting and studied theater at Northern Arizona University. Today, he is known as a musician, an author of fiction, and co-owner of a boutique publishing business. His short fiction was collected in Portraits in Bloodlines (with Rycke Foreman in 2018), and his novel, The Circus: An American Fantasy, debuted in 2023. He lives in Arizona with his wife.

Curt Walters, who was heralded by Art of the West as the ＂Greatest Living Grand Canyon Artist＂ in 1997, is the subject of his new book spanning his art career and personal history. Previously, Walters was included as one of ＂Forty Prominent People in the Western Art World＂ (Southwest Art 2011), and one of ＂Eight True Masters＂ (Art of the West 2007).
Since his career began in earnest at age 19, Walters has received fifty-five awards for excellence in oil painting. Curt Walters is a well-known participant in many western invitational museum shows, and seventeen museums hold Walters’ art in their collections. Three major museums have held retrospective exhibitions of his paintings: the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa; the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis; and the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff. Walters has been included in several art shows at FORBES Magazine Galleries in New York and California. Several of his paintings are featured in the Erivan and Helga Haub Family Western Art Collection at the Tacoma Art Museum.