| ARTIST BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH: | The first Canadian ceramics artist to achieve fame as an abstract expressionist, Walter Dexter was one of Canada’s leaders in his field, and pioneered Japanese Raku pottery techniques in Canada. He achieved a plethora of awards and distinctions before his death in 2015.
Born in Calgary, Dexter loved drawing cartoons and hoped to become a commercial artist. During his four-year diploma program in commercial art at the Alberta Institute of Technology and Art (later the Alberta College of Art + Design) he discovered pottery, and graduated as a fine arts student majoring in ceramic art in 1954. The University of Manitoba offered him a scholarship to study for a year at Stockholm’s Swedish School of Art and Craft. He plunged himself into historic and contemporary European art and culture as a student and a tourist, although he made no art.
In 1956 Dexter accepted a job at Calgary’s Ceramic Arts Studio, owned by his former professor Luke Lindoe, and continued developing under Lindoe’s direction and via experimentation. In 1957 Dexter began reading about Raku pottery, at a time when the 16th Century Japanese form was mostly unknown in North America. His early attempts exploded in the kiln, but Dexter continued experimenting until he developed his own signature style.
After moving to Metchosin, B.C. in 1975, Dexter found financial security and taught summer art courses at the University of Victoria for years. He crafted and painted decorative plates with Etruscan-style representational figures, primarily female nudes. Between 1995 and 2012 Dexter produced his “Torso Vases” suggestive of the Venus de Milo, which some called his crowning achievement.
Dexter’s work figured in numerous solo exhibitions and garnered many awards, including the 1992
Saidye Bronfman Award, Canada’s top crafts honour. The Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canadian Museum of Civilization among other institutions have collected his sculptures. Dexter died at age 83 in Victoria, B.C.
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