R. Slade Walters

R. Slade Walters is a multifaceted visual artist and communications professional whose career spans advertising, creative services, design, and fine art since the 1990s. Holding a degree in
communications and having worked extensively in prepress and printing, he combines design rigor with a storyteller’s sensibility. Slade produces entirely digital artwork in two distinct but related modes: digital photo paintings and remixed historical prints.

In his digital photo paintings, Slade begins with his own photographs of sites, artifacts, and culturally meaningful objects from places he has lived or visited around the world. He then layers color, pattern, and abstraction over or around those photographs, creating compositions that evoke place and culture. In his remixed historical prints, he works from high-resolution, public domain artworks like Japanese woodblock prints, illuminated manuscripts, or zoological illustrations. He digitally restores, colorizes, edits and reinterprets them, adding or subtracting elements in harmony with his visual vocabulary. Both styles culminate as fine art giclée, printed on canvas or archival papers.

Across all his work, Slade is guided by a fascination with how culture lives in objects, images, places and people. His aesthetic draws deeply from Japanese art, watercolor sensibility, and folk traditions. The result is artwork that looks backward and forward, bridging history and interpretation through
digital craft.