For fifteen years, from 1993 to 2008, painter Walter Fields presided over Jacklight Gallery in the East Village. If you were lucky enough to find yourself on East Seventh Street, you might have come across a storefront whose window was filled by a paint-splattered drop cloth. Hanging in front of it: a richly painted portrait of a boy wearing what looked like a paper hat. Luckier still, you might have passed on a day when the door was open and gone in to meet Walter.

There was no telling who else might come through that door: Hammer Head, the Dancing Cowgirl, the Illuminator, Madam X. Walter gave some of them their names. Kiki Smith stopped by on her bicycle; steel guitarist Steven Smithie recorded music there. Jacklight was a place where the East Village’s art, music, and everyday life met.

Walter’s paintings give unlikely figures and moments a life of their own. Working in acrylic and ink on wood, he paints portraits and scenes drawn from philosophy, literature, music, history, and the neighborhood outside his door. Virginia Woolf rides a surfboard. Nietzsche plays the piano. The line outside CBGB becomes a subject worth painting. Walter is drawn to depth and to older traditions of painting, but his choices of subject and his humor are entirely his own. He often appears in the work as a white horse.

Jacklight was also a gallery for other artists and a stage for Walter’s ideas. He mounted Love Rehab for the brokenhearted and held a Sick of Hip book signing for his poems. After Martha Stewart went to prison, he bought her line of dish towels, aprons, and pillowcases at Kmart and painted them with satirical images and puns. His handmade postcards, bookmarks, and fluorescent T-shirts took that wit into the neighborhood; his bookmarks appeared in St. Mark’s Bookshop, and his “No Phones! No Guns!” postcard found a home at B&H Dairy.

Born in Chicago in 1942, Walter began painting in high school and continued to study art, writing, and philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He later taught at the National Academy in New York, where his portrait of Ludwig Wittgenstein received the 2006 Ingles Griswold Nelson Prize for Painting. He also taught English as a second language and published poetry in small journals and the monograph ‘After Beauty’. Walter now lives in Moab, Utah.