BILL MARTIN - Mendocino Art Center

Walt
Padgett
by Michele Ketterer
24
In October, the Art Center is pleased to welcome
Walt Padgett, from Grants Pass, Oregon, into our
Main Gallery.
Walt is a most versatile artist: a painter, in
watercolor and oils; a sculptor in metal and bronze;
a photographer, a printmaker. He has taught and
exhibited extensively throughout his long career,
and just recently retired from his full-time teaching
position in the Art Dept. at Rogue Community
College.
The work that has so greatly captured his imagination,
and which will be featured in his exhibit, is
that of his traditional Japanese woodblock prints
– and it is the story of his pursuit of this art form
which connects Walt in a fascinating and oddly
synchronistic way to the Mendocino Art Center.
Although this is the first time that he will be showing
his work here, Walt’s ‘belonging’ is without question,
as the story which brings him to this point began to
unfold almost 30 years ago.
1978 marks Walt’s first exposure to traditional
Japanese woodblock printmaking – the work of
Junichiro Sekino – shown to him by a well-known
collector and teacher of the form, Robert McClain,
the founder of McClain’s Printmaking Supplies,
which, to this day, promotes the traditional style
of Japanese woodblock printing, known as ‘Moku
Hanga’.
“It blew me away,” he states, all these years
later – ‘the design, the richness of the colors... the
bold lines.” He began to study and learn more. In
1983 he decided to attend a summer workshop in
Japan, under the tutelage of Toshi Yoshida, a master
printmaker. He registered for the class at the Miasa
Bunka Center (the equivalent of the Mendocino Art
Center, in Japan) – Miasa being (one of the first of
our little ‘coincidences’, here) Mendocino’s ‘sister’
city – an arrangement that had begun the previous
year, through Bill Zacha’s own friendship with Toshi
Yoshida.
As sometimes happens here as well, the class
was cancelled. Walt called and got the master, himself,
on the phone. “Well, you’re still coming, aren’t
you??”’ he was asked. So he went. He and one other
student spent a month studying in the basement of
the Yoshida family home, where he learned the traditional
skills from the artist, as well as observing the
work of all the additional artisans who performed