An Interview with Artist Walter Crump
Walter Crump (known to most as “Rusty”) is a photographer, painter, printmaker, and longtime teacher of art. He is especially known for his pinhole photographs, many of which capture the world of Boston’s cast-off industrial debris.
Walter has been a member of The Distillery art community for nearly 40 years, establishing his studio here in 1985, shortly before his time as a Fulbright Scholar in Pakistan. In the winter of 2023 he relocated to continue work at his new studio, a converted garage at the home that he and his wife, Shahla Haeri, recently purchased. This interview traverses his path to becoming an artist, his methods of printmaking, painting, and photography, and recalls the early days in South Boston.
View and follow Crump’s work at waltercrump.com
How do you describe yourself as an artist?
Walter Crump: That's a hard question to answer. I am an artist. When I was a little kid my parents bought me a paint set – it had a table with an easel, poster paints, some paper – and I used it up in two weeks. That should have been a hint. So, I've always unconsciously been drawn to doing visual things. I was diagnosed as dyslexic at a very early age, which was very fortunate because in the first or second grade I couldn't read. I was sent to a private school that had special classes, and while in high school I had special afternoon classes. I remember being bored out of my mind in this hot, dark den where my tutor held her classes.
I remember, still very young, a friend of mine, who is now an architect, was taking a local art course. My mother asked me if I would like to join the class and I said yes. I think I joined in the middle of the course. The teacher took us out to a park and said, “Look around and see something you want to draw." I didn't see anything there that interested me! So, instead, I drew this imaginary dam with a nice meadow beneath it. I don't think the drawing made that much sense, and I could tell she was upset that I didn’t follow her directions. I felt a little intimidated so I never went back. That kind of direct instruction was just not to my liking.
When I graduated high school I didn't want to go to college. I was really fed up with school, so I joined the Navy for two years. When I returned, I went to Guilford College, where I took an art appreciation course. For the final project, we had to create something on our own. It was then that I did my first painting and I was just hooked. I lived at home for a while and commuted to school. I set up an easel in the basement and painted for as long as I was at home. But when I started living in an apartment near the school there was no access to doing that stuff.
I didn't really do much visual work again until I came to Boston. I had a friend who modeled for art classes. She said, "You should model, it’s an easy job." I said, "No, I'd never do that!" Men wore jockstraps in those days so what's the big deal? So, she ended up persuading me into modeling for a class and I ended modeling a lot at Boston University. While modeling I got to see a lot of the kids’ drawings – I kept thinking, I can draw better than those kids. I eventually asked one of the teachers, Lloyd Lilly, who was really a wonderful teacher, if I could draw in his class after I finished modeling. He graciously agreed and treated me just like a student. So I started drawing in his class. And then I decided to go to that school.
I attended the BU School Of Arts for three years. They let me skip the freshman year. I soon found though it was not a perfect fit. Almost all the teachers were “descendants” of the German Expressionists school, which emphasized direct bold marks. I worked in an entirely different way. I worked indirectly. I was into subtle tones and delicate shading. Thinking back, if I hadn’t been so belligerent I would have learned a lot more than I did. I remember I got in an ongoing conflict with one of the teachers because I persisted in doing delicate drawings in spite of his persistence to do the German Expressionist stuff. One day I walked out of his class after he had erased one of my drawings one too many times. Eventually we sort of made up after that.
Anyway, I still learned a lot. All we did was basically draw and paint the model. That was the thrust of the whole school. And so I really learned how to draw and paint, especially figures. I had decided to go for a Master's because I really liked the work of the director of the Master’s program. Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack in my senior year. After that, I decided I'd had enough of school. I’d been to Guilford College for three years, I had gone to Harvard Extension when I was living in Cambridge, and then The BU School of The Arts for three years. After I graduated I began teaching. Previously, I used to model for art classes at Commonwealth School. This was one of the few high schools that had nude life drawing classes. One day, I noticed a printmaking studio there and I told Herb Parsons, a friend who was the drawing and painting teacher at Commonwealth, “If there's ever a need for a printmaking teacher, would you consider me?" A few years later, when Charles Wadsworth, the printmaking teacher retired, I got the job teaching printmaking, as well as drawing and painting. Herb had moved on the other things.
It was a wonderful school. The kids and faculty were bright and great to work with, and you were given a lot of autonomy. Early on, several painting, drawing, and printmaking classes had all been scheduled at the same time, even though there were four floors between the two classes that I had to run up and down to keep the classes going. It was exhausting. I finally told Charles Merrill that it was too hard. I ended up just teaching printmaking. In the mid '80s I was asked if I would also teach photography. I said, "I've never been in a darkroom." I was told, "It's alright, the seniors will teach darkroom techniques.” So, I started “teaching” photography. And the more I taught, the more I became fascinated with the medium, and soon began experimenting with my own photography.
While learning photography I continued to do printmaking until the early nineties. I was producing a lot of work and exhibiting in many galleries across the country. But I was reaching a point in my printmaking where I felt I was repeating myself – I wasn’t finding new challenges. I had lost my vision. And all of a sudden, I began to see photography as a possible new direction, it offered many possibilities. I was not so interested in straight photography, I gravitated to all the odd things you could do, such as making multiple exposures and pinhole photography. So now, I guess you could say, I'm an alternative photographer as well as a painter. I finally gave up printmaking altogether and sold my big etching press. Now I mostly photograph and paint.
About once a year I get together with two old friends and we just sort of have a long afternoon together, a “session.” We talk about lots of things, our feelings, our needs, being artists, and stuff like that. After many years of having known each other, we recently started doing these “sessions.” In one of our first meetings, one of my friends mentioned, “I recently found out something about myself, I'm Asperger's.” He had become an art star soon after graduating from Boston University and was having all these shows, getting his work in collections and having numerous interviews and stuff. Recalling those times, he said, “I realized that I was drawn to being an artist because I liked the power and the notoriety, not so much living the life of an artist.” So, eventually he gave up his artistic career.
I thought about his reflections a lot, and what motivates me as an artist. I knew I was just the opposite. I had to be an artist. It’s in my blood. I don't know what I'd do if I wasn't creating art. I’m most comfortable in the visual world. I have the need to just be working in my studio every day, even holidays. Shahla, my wonderful wife, would get deservedly irritated with me because on, say, even Thanksgiving Day I'd want to go to my studio for a few hours. I just felt this strong urge to be among my work. To keep the peace, I don’t do that anymore. Once I began art school, that’s all I have ever wanted to do. I should have spent more of my time promoting my work, courting galleries, etc. I guess you could say it’s like having a compulsion, an addiction.
And now, packing up my studio and being confronted with all the past work I have amassed over the years is a little overwhelming. I didn't realize how much work I had created. My memory isn’t all that good, so I had literally forgotten a lot of the work I had done. All of a sudden, all that work was all piled up, or stacked in rows against the wall, all these paintings, photographs, prints, and who knows what, all I had accumulated over the years, now in one place at the same time, all this stuff created over the years, that now, in the present, had weight and substance. Perception of all the work I had done in the past became embedded more in the actual work than in my recollections. It's been delightful recalling all that work. Seeing it all together has been both a revelation and a little bit alarming at the same time – kind of like space and time folding back onto itself.
But to finally answer your question, I just have a deep need to be an artist, one who tends to focus on several projects at a time. I generally try to concentrate on one project, but pursue, to a lesser degree, others at the same time. It keeps life interesting, and if one thing isn’t going well usually something else is. I like to develop my work slowly. That approach allows for many ideas to gradually percolate up, especially in painting, so many interesting things can happen over time that would not have come to the surface otherwise. I seldom get bored or run out of ideas. It's really nice to have other mediums to go to where different emerging ideas can influence another project. I think sometimes by leaving things alone for a while and coming back to it later your mind gets reset, to embrace entirely new directions – that’s exciting. So that's the way I work.
Can you summarize the forms that your art-making has taken in the last few years?
Walter Crump: For years and years I was a printmaker. At first, I primarily did etching and intaglio. Stuff where you were traditionally supposed to make an edition of a plate. I quickly got very tired of that. It's tedious wiping the same plate over and over for ten to, say seventy-five times. So, I began to do variants, mostly color variants of a plate, which led to doing monoprints and monotypes by inking and assembling a lot of separate pieces together to make the plate, resulting in a single image. A final plate could sometimes consist of as many as fifty or more parts. I called these images “unique prints.” I did lots of imaginative figurative work then, both paintings and prints. Parallel to that I was working on a long-running series of imaginary landscape monoprints. Those prints were the ones that involved many plates which I would reuse in reconfigured ways in future prints. I would often reuse certain of those plates without reinking them in the next image. I called them ghost plates. They would become distant hazy mountain shapes and such. To make these plates I also used lots of odd materials such as steel wool, toilet paper, acetate strips, and so on. All those images were related, so to speak, having included parts from previous plates. I think of them all as having a kind of symbiosis. I loved this sort of seamless way of things interweaving and evolving, where each print is significantly or subtly interrelated, like the genealogy of a family or a culture. That's why I loved to work as a printmaker.
When I started teaching photography in the mid eighties I slowly began to withdraw from printmaking. In 1990 Shahla and I both had Fulbright Scholarships to Pakistan. We were there for two years. I taught printmaking at the National College of Art in Lahore, and Shahla, an anthropologist, was writing a book. Those were a wonderful two years and we made many friends. The printmaking studio at the College had wonderful facilities. My two colleagues, Afshar and Anwar and I would stay after classes along with a few dedicated students and do our own work. We all fed off of each other’s work. It was a really exciting and fulfilling time. I focused on etchings and intaglios as well as paintings. But that was sort of the end of my romance with printmaking. I was also doing a lot of photography as well and I had begun to seriously explore pinhole photography. While there I gave a number of pinhole workshops. Just before going to teach in Pakistan I took a series of photography courses at the Worcester Art center. I had this wonderful teacher who was a sort of an Ansel Adams clone, with a big old view camera he lugged around. But instead of using fancy lenses he had turned it into a pinhole camera. I found that fascinating. So while taking his class one night, all my camera equipment was stolen from my car. I couldn’t afford to buy new equipment so I started making and using pinhole cameras.
And that was that – I just never looked back. It took me two, three months to actually learn how to make and use pinhole cameras and begin to make proper exposures. I prefer offbeat imagery that is a little eccentric, definitely not mainstream. That’s why I gravitate toward alternative methods of photography. Even when I switched to digital photography and learned Photoshop I was looking for ways to manipulate images in unique ways – not unlike making unique prints, but as a photographer. Some friends of mine said that my early photographs looked like my early prints.
Now I do a lot of pinhole photography. Prior to digital photography I worked in a darkroom. I used an Agfa paper that would tone beautifully. I used toning baths that would alter the color of the print into very muted neutral colors, into sepias, browns, and then to subtle blues and purples. I would pass my photographs through four or five different toning trays, which was a little unusual. By passing the prints from one bath to another and so on I was searching for the unexpected. I always encourage accidents in my work, allowing random things to happen. Making those prints was sort of like being an alchemist.
A lot of times I would screw up the print by putting in too many toners and stuff, but I would get enough magical things happening to enough prints to keep me going. I loved that process. But then Agfa suddenly went out of business and I couldn't get the paper anymore. I decided it was time to make the transition to digital photography and so I use a camera as a source rather than as an end in itself. Whatever photographs I took, I felt the need to manipulate them in some way. Ansel Adams used to say that before you take your exposure, you should know exactly what and how you are going to process it. My approach is the opposite. You take the picture, then you find ways to manipulate it, slowly discovering interesting things to do to it.
And the same goes for painting. I gradually moved from being a kind of imaginative, mostly figurative painter to doing abstract work. I had always been attracted to abstract painting. I felt it manifested a kind of personal visual language that was closer to poetry or music. It took me a long while to find my personal language. Now, when I begin a painting I have no idea where it’s going. I like the metaphor of a person who is compelled to travel but never decides on a specific destination. When you start your trip you find yourself on familiar roads leading from your town, going this way and that, always a little different, but still frustratingly ending up at familiar destinations. But occasionally you might see this hint of a path shrouded in the bushes that goes off into an unexpected direction. This is what you live for, so you eagerly take that path and all of a sudden you’ve discovered a whole new environment. That's the way I work, searching for that shrouded path.
I think the things that can happen over time don’t happen when you work quickly. A lot of new ideas come to me while working on something over many months. When contemplating a painting for an extended period of time, I often discover new directions, new riches. And that's what I love about slowly making a painting. Working in that way can be like meditating or being in a trance.
What are the interesting objects you build in order to photograph?
Walter Crump: Oh, well that's a whole other story. The teacher I mentioned at Boston University that I loved was Walter Murch – he showed at Betty Parsons Gallery in New York. Betty Parsons was known for pioneering many of the Abstract Expressionists when they first started. In a way, Murch synthesized abstract with a kind of super realist painting. He hung out with all those Abstract Expressionist guys. He would start his paintings just by making marks, creating an abstract surface of marks. As he worked he would begin to see some kind of object in the painting. He said, “Painting is the manufacture of useless objects.” Which is something I've always liked. I’m not sure if many of my artist friends agree with that, but I’ve always liked that phrase.
Also, Murch really liked machine parts. He lived in New York, and in those days Canal Street had all these basement stores which sold used electronic and mechanical parts – you could find amazing objects down there. So he'd peruse those shops and find some object or other that resembled the image he saw in his painting. He'd prop it up, light it, and then make a supper realistic painting of objects that often emerged from a more or less abstract background. The reflected light he painted on these objects would seem to hover just above them, as if the light didn't originate from the object itself, but perhaps came from another dimension. I just loved that.
Early on I was following in Murch’s footsteps, making object paintings. But when I turned to photography one of the first things I did was to start photographing found objects. I had accumulated this massive collection of junk – machine parts, electronic parts, all this stuff – and I started making little constructions out of those found mechanical and electronics parts. I would construct these as kind of sculptures and then photograph them. I would often put a textured transparent film in front of the sculptures, or later by applying textured layers in Photoshop. I photographed these objects, both with a digital camera and pinhole cameras. It’s an ongoing series. I’ve always had a certain fondness for found detritus, so I feel like I’m paying homage to a bygone age. One of the things I loved about The Distillery was that you could find all kinds of interesting junk, found objects, all kinds of artifacts, most of which I now have in my collection of old machine parts.
What year did you move into The Distillery?
Walter Crump: I think it was 1985. I was among the first tenants. There were a few tenants here. Joyce McDaniel was here. There was a woodworker named Dave MacLeod – wonderful guy, told great stories, drank too much.
I had been looking all over the city for a studio and this is where I ended up. When Fred showed me my space the whole sixth floor was empty – it was full of dusty lumber and it was a mess. Fred showed me all the lower studios that had low ceilings, but when I came up to the top floor with these high ceilings I said this is what I want. He chalked off an area and said this is your space. And so I built everything – I put up sound walls, put down new flooring etc. I could not have found a better studio or landlord.
In my first years here there was a small group of artists in the building. Lauren, a sculptor, and a fellow who did large paintings, and Frankie Gardner, a painter and maybe a few other people. We were all painters. We started meeting once a month to share and discuss what we were working on. It was a nice group.
It's always kind of magical for me, when you have at least one person as a sounding board, but it's great when you have several people who you can go to for opinions. Eventually, the group kind of fell apart. Lauren felt that our discussions weren’t going anywhere and instead we should be talking about our goals, like what galleries we hoped to show in and stuff, rather than discuss our work. Well, that approach got old really quick.
It’s always a benefit to have another artist who you can discuss your work with. Sarah Walker, who was in that big studio that goes up to the roof, and I would give each other crits. Our painting was different but there was some kind of interconnectedness and so it was easy to understand what each other’s work was about. She'd call me up and I would come down to her studio and she would ask me “where should I go with this?” and we'd sit there and have a half hour discussion or so. And when I was in a bind I'd ask her to come up and get her opinion on where a piece was going. Finally she and her husband split and she moved to New York to be with her new boyfriend. So that was the end of that.
And then not too long ago, Bridget Watson, a wonderful painter who had a studio two doors down from mine, we had a similar friendship. Our paintings obliquely related to each other, enough so that we could find beneficial ways to talk about each other's work and see its possibilities and where it might go. And that was great until she and her husband moved out to the suburbs because the rent in South Boston had become too expensive.
Eventually there were more and more artists in the building, but most were all much younger, and so I didn't get to know them very well. I’ve had a few friends at The Distillery over the years, most have moved on to other places. Joyce McDaniel and I were good friends, and when Bill Stroud became the Distillery building manager we became very good friends. And also Mike Mullaney, who is on my floor, he is a good friend. I just got to know Eric Franklin, who helped with my move to the suburb. I wish we had known each other sooner. And then Fred and Judy, over the years, as well as getting to know you [Jacob Gordon] since you recently moved here, has been great.
I’ll miss everyone. But mostly, what I’ve loved about having a studio here is that I have been left alone. In spite of being gregarious, I’m also a bit of a recluse. I have always craved long hours just to be alone to do my work, so the studio has suited me well. The building has been a real oasis for artists. The Distillery has been a great place for me and I will very much miss being here.
Portraits of Crump by Jacob Gordon