Hope Native Steven Walden, Artist

There’s a Hope native who now lives in the St. Louis area who is really doing some great things with his artistic talent. Steven Walden graduated from Hope High in 1993 and took a roundabout route to becoming a professional artist.

Walden is a professional artist who has used his talent not only for his living but also to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for various charities over the past several years. Much of his work depicts sports or pop culture. He has joined with several sports figures to use his art to help raise funds for their charitable organizations.

Walden didn’t start out as an artist. “I moved away in 1993 to attend UCA to get my first degree…I came back after getting my undergraduate degree in 1997 and ’98…that was the last time I lived here,” says Walden. His initial degree was in English and he pursued an academic career. In that first college experience, he also minored in Art History. Walden took an actual art class during that period and didn’t exactly thrive in it. He moved on to get his Master’s of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans. Later, he got a master’s degree in Professional Counseling from Webster University in St. Louis.

Walden worked as an English professor for several years in New Orleans and north Louisiana until he couldn’t make a living and pay off his college loans working as a teacher. He then switched to copy writing which was more lucrative. He still found something lacking and started seeing a therapist. At this point he decided he wanted to become a therapist. Not long after he started his therapy education, he had two traumatic situations in his life. First, his dad died in 2012. According to Walden, “it’s one of those things that changes you forever”. Following this, Walden’s marriage ended. At this point Walden says “I’m at rock bottom…I’m living alone…I was broke and in school and almost 40. I remember at one point going in Wal-Mart with a $20 bill trying to figure out how I can make this last through the week”. He notes, “this is not where my life should have been at 40…I felt very embarrassed about that”.

During this time, as part of Walden’s education, he took an art therapy class. “I’d never painted before, not with any regularity or intent of doing anything. I decided I was going to paint my grief,” says Walden. To Walden’s surprise his classmates told him he was really good. He kept doing it because it was very rewarding to him and after putting some of his work on Facebook he had friends asking him to paint something for them for money. His friends encouraged him to pursue an exhibit. “Someone sent me a link to a show for beginning artists…I did and I got in,” says Walden. He said his work was popular and that led to him being invited to an event to paint live. As things continued, he started making money from his painting. Walden decided if he was going to do art as a “side hustle”, he tried to determine what would be a good target. He began doing sports art and he decided he wanted to help people with his art. Walden looked at some sports figures who had charities and started reaching out to see if he could help one of these charities.

Walden said one of the sports figures he first reached out to was Adam Wainwright, a star pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals. Says Walden, “he’s a wonderful charity called Big League Impact…which does a lot of feeding families, clothing kids, and helping women who are the victims of sexual assault”. Wainwright was coming to a children’s hospital and Walden knew the CEO. After talking to her, she commissioned Walden to create a painting depicting Wainwright. When Wainwright came to the hospital, she showed him the painting and told him of Walden’s interest in doing some work to help his charity. Wainwright saw the painting and tweeted a picture of him posing next to the piece, recreating the image, and inviting Walden to contact him. That, says Walden, helped kickstart his career and helped him work with other individuals such as Hall of Fame Quarterback Kurt Warner. Walden has done several events with him in St. Louis and did an event with him last year before the pandemic in Phoenix.

Walden’s favorite achievement is that he’s helped raised over a third of a million dollars through charity events with his art work.

Walden is quite prolific. He estimates he has created “easily a thousand” pieces counting incomplete works. In the past year he has completed close to sixty pieces. He also took his first-ever art class and says, “I think my art work has improved considerably because of it”.

A hallmark of Walden’s work is his use of vibrant colors. He said the color came about because “I was terribly depressed when I started painting. My art’s not pretentious, it’s easy to get, in most of them there’s no ulterior message, they’re about joy…for me I was at the lowest point of my life and I like to tell people that color saved me”. He calls the use of color “driftwood that helped me keep afloat”. Walden says the colors are reminiscent of colors he used as a kid.

Walden is still a young man at 46 and probably has his most productive years in front of him. He quickly says his aim for the future is “helping more people”. Walden says he hopes that involves art and he hopes to do more public speaking (Walden gave a virtual commencement address for the Hope High class of 2020 and spoke at commencement in person this year). He’s looking forward to working with his friend Robby Turner in the spring on an art festival in Hope. Walden says they hope to add another artist to the event both will be coming to Hope in the fall to look at exhibit space. He said Turner is part of his story as they went to high school together and Walden admired his work while they were students at Hope High. Walden is hoping the event will reflect the diversity of the community and he hopes to locate a local Hispanic artist. A further dream is to paint a mural in downtown Hope. He even mused about downtown Hope being a “walking art gallery”.

Be looking to hear more about Steven Walden working with his hometown and bringing his art and the art of others to all of Hope. He’s looking forward to inviting a variety of folks to have a “seat at the table” and to allow them to share their gifts with our community in the future.