Feathered Fantasy

Artist creates gods and goddesses one plume at a time I'm being watched. It's Thanksgiving weekend, and I've opted to pop into Roberts Gallery at Scottsdale's el Pedregal Festival Marketplace. The person closest to me is at least 5 feet away, but somehow I feel completely surrounded. As I scan the gallery walls, my eyes meet the mugs of a mythical goddess, an African warrior, a gothic protector and an ancient tribal chief.

Paranoia aside, it seems like the soundless voyeurs aren't hanging on the walls as much as they're poking their heads through some sort of rip in the fabric of time. Eyes black with infinity, they stun with the power of a cathedral pipe organ and yet they whisper, soft and delicate-like the brush of a feather. They envelop and enchant me. I want to feel them, let them pull me through the rip. But I won't because I've just noticed that I really am being watched. Gallery owner Robert Padesky has spotted me and is coming to welcome me to the world of Virgil Walker, the Arizona artist who has been crafting his unique brand of masks and statues exclusively for his gallery for 20 years.

Even after two decades, Padesky beams like a proud papa when he tells the story. He first became enchanted by Walker's work during the mid-1980s after a girlfriend showed him a special mask.

"I wasn't concerned with whether or not they sold," he recalls. "I just felt they were something that needed to be shared."

When Padesky moved his business from Old Town Scottsdale to el Pedregal in 1988, Walker's masks moved with him and have since become the gallery's signature seller. A seasoned art dealer, Padesky still says the pieces are "by far the most amazing thing I've seen in the world."

Sculpting talents alone could keep this artist fed for life, but Virgil Walker's works are not complete until he painstakingly creates each one, not with acrylics or oils, but feathers-thousands of feathers. The result conjures thoughts of rare and exotic birds, with shimmering emeralds and turquoises and copper hues, but Walker uses what he calls "feathers from birds that people eat," including chickens, pheasants and turkeys.

When birds are plucked to fulfill their dinner-table destiny, distributors wash, disinfect and bag up their feathers for sale. Walker sifts through the sacks, examining the color, cup and curve of each feather in pursuit of the perfect ones. This process that he calls "managing pixels" ensures the geography of a feather matches the topog-raphy of his anatomical landscapes. About 60 percent don't make the cut. The chosen ones are clipped to reveal only their masts, which he then works and splays with his fingertips before layering them like shingles on the form in front of him. Padesky estimates that each mask requires an aver-age of 350 hours of painstaking work.

Based on Walker's observation that social patterns enable humans to waste much of their lives, the artist splits his creative day into two 12-hour periods, during which he strictly schedules work, research and rest. Once a year, he emerges from his Tempe home/studio/hermit's lair with his recent work and makes his way to north Scottsdale for his traditional Thanksgiving weekend show. Gallery-goers watch as Walker puts the finishing touches on pieces that he casts and shapes.

Born on the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the third-generation Arizonan is a career-artist-come-lately. If you ask one of his seven children what it was like being raised with his art, they'll say they don't know. Most of them were grown by the time it occurred to him. Despite majoring in art at Northern Arizona University, Walker classified his artistic endeavors as hobbies while he climbed a narrowing ladder of jobs to support his family. He went from cop to youth counselor to businessman and finally Realtor before arriving at a disturbing reality.

"I couldn't be around people without sizing them up financially," says Walker. "It didn't matter who they were."

At 42, Walker fled to a small trailer tucked into the acreage of a friend's farm in an effort to recover his soul and sensibilities. On solitary strolls around the property, he caught his reflection in nature. Observing birds of prey and a feral cat on the hunt for sustenance, he realized he had concealed his true identity with the mask of a predator.

"I realized that a mask is an icon of boundary; it provides information but it hides it, too. It started there," he says. "The presence of the feather imports life and death. It came from a living thing."

In light of his predator/prey experience, Walker admits that his early mask creations were "hawkish," though they quickly began to channel less obvious associations and interests of the artist.

"People tend to think because he's an Arizona artist that he bases his work on Native Americans, but really you see a variety of influences, from African to Asian to South American," says Padesky.

The word "transcultural" fits Walker and his work because both give the distinct impression that he has traveled, around the world and through people and time. Despite his reclusive lifestyle, the avid reader of everything from Carl Sagan to Socrates and a self-proclaimed Google and news channel junkie, he strives to let "the wash and slosh of ideas, the swirl of loves and hates" drift through his mind.

Wherever his mind takes him, Walker now goes dressed as himself, a student of life whose inspiration never stays in one place for too long-something that whispers through his work, which Padesky says never stays in his gallery for too long, either. Me, I think I'll stay awhile.

JoBeth Jamison is Special Projects Editor of Arizona Highways.

Richard K. Webb lives in Mesa.

► when you go

Location: Roberts Gallery in north Scottsdale, inside el Pedregal Festival Marketplace at 34505 N. Scottsdale Road, on the southeast corner of Carefree Highway and Scottsdale Road.

Events: Walker's work is on display year-round at Roberts Gallery, and for three days over Thanksgiving weekend Walker himself is on display, crafting new pieces and conversing with the public. Call the gallery for dates and times.

Additional Information: (480) 488-1088; www.wyndhampromotions.com/elpedregal. com; www.vmwalkerarts.com.