Title: Red Star/5 Seconds to Zero
Artist: Richard Guy Walton
Date: 1982
Medium: Oil on burlap
Credit Line: Collection of the John and Geraldine Lilley Museum of Art, Gift from the Walton Trust

Item description: Beginning in the 1980s, Walton’s preoccupation with perspective merged with psycho-spiritual meditations on the cosmos, as expressed in paintings with astronomical themes. The rectangles and dots in Red Star symbolize celestial bodies. For years, Walton kept Red Star on an easel for contemplation. In 1998, he wrote that a star may seem “stable, or unmoving, in a set frame of space. But if you see Red Star as I do now, it will be gone in a moment for it is ablaze in brief ‘time’. Black space will remain.”