M. Douglas Walton
Editor’s Note: Our classmate Melvin Douglas Walton may not have been 
known to many of us because of his limited ability to speak when he started high school at East. He graduated with us and then went on to an extraordinary career. Fred Elder talked with Doug by phone in summer 2021. Doug agreed to write a story for the website, but we have not been able to reach him since. Messages on his Facebook page indicate that he has been ill. Thinking he is someone you should know, we put together the information below from online biographies and media stories about him. At left, Doug in 1960. Note that this story was originally published here in 2021.
Growing up in Carmel, Oklahoma, M. Douglas Walton suffered from a speech disorder that prevented him from pronouncing consonants. Rather than endure ridicule for his unintelligible speech, he simply did not speak for fourteen years. “I had no friends, no acquaintances. In school I never went on recess,” he said. “I lived in a world of my own.” Doug’s parents moved the family to Wichita so that he could be treated at the Institute of Logopedics. While he was a student at East High, he began to speak and gradually became fluent after extensive speech therapy.
Years of silence shaped his personality and stimulated his artistic talents. He remembers being content in his own silent world. “As a child, I developed a strong observational capacity,” he recalled. “I saw the minutest detail and beauty that was everywhere. Once I did learn to speak, the bigger problem became, what do you say?” Artistry emerged for him as a means of communication.
After graduation from East High in 1960, Doug attended Oklahoma State University where he earned a Bachelor of Architecture in 1965 and continued with graduate studies in architecture. He practiced as an architect in Louisiana and began teaching architecture at Louisiana Tech University in 1972. He identified a key event in his life as attending a workshop in 1976 with master watercolorist Edgar Whitney in Kennebunkport, Maine. Soon, he was also teaching painting and other arts at LTU.
Teaching was a liberating experience. The words he had struggled to articulate in daily life flowed freely. “When I was teaching, I could simply speak and the words came,” he told an interviewer for Country Roads in 2018. “The Balinese believe that if you’re open, then the universal energy comes in. Then you can be highly creative and able to speak on a high level, because words are not conscious words, but form in the subconscious. From then on, I concentrated on teaching, rather than just painting.”
Doug Walton is noted for teaching a system of creative thought through the medium of painting. The Country Roads interview comments, “For forty years Walton has taught artists to see the world differently, leading small groups on international trips in search of artistic inspiration. Typically, his
pupils are persons in their fifties through their seventies, whom he thinks are more receptive to the notion of an unseen world beyond that which is immediately apparent.”
At his painting workshops, Doug emphasizes immersion in the local landscape and culture, not just observation. Whether painting flowers, scenery, buildings, or abstractions, his students become participants in daily life of the locale as well as learning to make deeply spiritual connections between themselves and the place. In addition to locations throughout the U.S., Doug has taught in Europe, Canada, Morocco, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, India, Peru, Guatemala, Vietnam, Cambodia, China, Bali, and Nepal. (Above, Cityscape, 2011)
According to Country Roads, Doug Walton has returned to Bali at least 29 times, leading workshops in sacred places on that lovely Indonesian island.
“A Villager in Bali”
In 2015, Doug and a group of his students were crossing the Friendship Bridge between Tibet and Nepal, when a magnitude 8.5 earthquake occurred, killing about 9,000
people and leaving more than 3 million homeless. Doug described their experiences. “We found ourselves stranded on a remote slope amidst the Himalayan Mountains for 6 days and 5 nights. We had nothing except what was in our pockets. Within hours, more than 3,000 Nepalese refugees were assembling a blue tarp village on that terraced hilltop. They too had nothing, but they gave us everything. Even during the turmoil, each morning the children would place rose petals on the steps to provide a path of beauty for the many footsteps of the day. I was forever changed, humbled, and enlightened in witnessing their humanity during the darkest hours.”
“Boulders bigger than cars came down all around us. Many Nepalese lost their lives. But the amazing thing was we saw no unhappiness, then or afterwards! People moved onward—from destruction to construction. Within hours they were feeding the five thousand with great joy and happiness.”
“After the earthquake, I came to see that my paintings needed to be performances. The magnitude showed me that they had to be big—ten feet, twenty feet. But at the same time I found myself simplifying my compositions to make them more poetic.” (Above left, “Havens,” a depiction of the blue tarp city on the hillside, one of more than a hundred of Doug’s Nepal earthquake paintings exhibited in Shreveport, LA in 2017.)
The Shreveport Times commented on the exhibit. “His solo exhibit Quake in Paradise: Echoes of Nepal showcases artful images created by putting Benjamin Moore latex interior paint, vinyl, duct tape and tissue paper on canvas at Artscape, 708 Texas St. in downtown Shreveport. Walton purposefully chose these materials because he felt the elevated spiritual quality he hoped to achieve with his art couldn’t happen without something tough enough to echo the moment when everything changed for him.”
“Pathways” captures the bridge and the moment of the earthquake.
The Country Roads interview summarized: “As an artist focused less on connecting with the physical world and more on capturing its energy and spirit, Walton found this experience changed him forever. With his non-objective paintings, once again Walton found himself able to transcend the physical world and reach for the universal energy that he first perceived as a soundless, solitary child.”
Doug Walton, “Exuberance”
“I think that’s the message in my paintings: that there’s more to life than the physical world, and we have to catch up to that. There’s a beauty beyond that of the physical world that is simply awesome.”
In 1997, Doug Walton received a National Communication award from the National Council of Communicative Disorders in Washington DC where he was recognized for having become an effective communicator through speech and art and for his active support of communication services.
During the pandemic, he has continued to lead workshops for artists and exhibitions, although on a limited basis.
A selection of Doug Walton’s artwork that is available online is being developed for this website’s Gallery page.
This article used the following resources for quotations and background information:
- Country Roads, March 2018, “Perspectives: M. Douglas Walton”
- AskArt, “Facts about M. Douglas Walton”
- Touchstone Inn Presents: M. Douglas Walton
- Side Door Gallery Presents: M. Douglas Walton
- Artscape Shreveport, August 18, 2017
- Shreveport Times, “This Ruston artist survives Nepal earthquake and it shakes him to his core,” August 28, 2017
I love the blue tents in the painting about the earthquake in Nepal. They have a sense of flying past the mountain side and on into space. The painting has a romantic abstraction that encourages a free-floating through color and space. The story about the rose petals creating paths speak to the heart about a specific choice of survival. Doug’s other paintings have patterns of flying colors and skilled drawing that feel like the chatter of Asian streets — where a foreign language becomes noise or music. Doug’s paintings seem to capture more than the visual, and present us with sound and crowded space in a foreign language. In some of his works the light-hearted feelings are based in the history of architectural renderings. His paintings are skillful reports of a time and place that becomes a poetic document of his travels. His is a magical body of work.