Prints by Pasadena Artist Walter Askin on view in the coffeehouse

Excerpted from an artist statement:

To be an artist is to engage in the wonderfully fulfilling, dangerous, and intensively social act of creating images and propositions as we search for visual ideas resonant with emerging beliefs and values. It is a privilege, a joy, a delight, and quite often a dire necessity to be able to give ideas tangible form… to create images that liberate the imaginative life… to transform thought patterns... 

My works give focus to a way I view our world and offer the freedom to act in playful ways.  They depict imaginary events in a particular manner by personal choice and poetic nonsense to give life hope and joy.

There are 13 pieces on view. 12 are lithographs (1 is a giclee). Walter's work is printed at Tamarind Institute, Arizona State University, Brigham Young University, or Kelpra Studio in London. After the limited edition is printed, the lithography stones are destroyed and no additional prints are made. 

Walter Askin received his BA and MA degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and was named Calmerton Scholar in Art. He also studied at the Ruskin School in Oxford, England.  He has had one-person shows at the De Young Museum, the Pasadena, La Jolla and Santa Barbara Museums, the Ericson Gallery in New York, the Kunstlerhaus in Vienna, Austria, through the U.S. Information Agency Traveling Exhibition program in the former Yugoslavia, and the Hellenic-American Union in Athens and Thessalonica, Greece. He has been represented in group shows at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum in New York, the U.S. Embassy in England and the San Francisco Museum of Art, among many others around the country and the world. 

He is in the collections of the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the University of California Berkeley, the Portland Oregon Museum of Art and the National Trust in Britain, along with numerous private collections. He was an Assistant Curator at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor Museum in San Francisco. 

He is Professor of Art Emeritus at California State University, Los Angeles where he received the Outstanding Professor Award and the Artist Award from the Pasadena Arts Council. He has also been a visiting professor of art at the University of Hawaii, California State University, Long Beach, the Irish Academy of Art in Dublin and U.C. Berkeley.

He was an artist-in-residence in the Arts/Industry Program of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Wisconsin, the Huntington Hartford Foundation in California, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Ragdale Foundation and the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, the Hambidge Center for the Arts and Sciences and the Ossabaw Island Foundation in Georgia, the Vermont Studio Colony, the Tamarind Institute at the University of New Mexico, Kelpra Studio in London, the Visual Arts Research Institute at Arizona State University, Brigham Young University in Utah and the Art Center of the Athens School of Fine Art on Mykonos Greece.