R. T. Wallen

At 82 years old, R. T. Wallen physical status not available right now. We will update R. T. Wallen's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Wallen began his career as a field biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, where he participated in the re-introduction of sea otters to southeast Alaska and the introduction of muskox to Nunivak Island. He spent six months in 1965 as an observer on Little Diomede Island, living in a semi-subterranean house and hunting with the local men in a traditional skin boat known as an umiak. While in the field, he began sketching the fauna near his camp. His drawings were used in the original Alaska Wildlife Notebook series. He became a full-time staff artist at the headquarters in Juneau.

Wallen left the Fish and Game department in 1967 to become a full-time independent artist. He set up a small art gallery in Juneau called the Kayak Gallery and later renamed the Wallen Gallery. From there he sold charcoal sketches, watercolors and hand-pulled lithographs from limestone that were printed by the notable New York printers George C. Miller & Sons in editions of between 25 and 185.

He and a friend invented a new method of printing using eraser block and fabric for the color print entitled Arrival of the Seabirds, based on his experience of the spring hunt on Little Diomede Island. They called this printing technique Pointigraphy. While it achieved a completely new look, it was so laborious that they printed only one edition of 170 prints, entitled “Arrival of the Seabirds", based on Wallen's experiences during the spring hunt on Little Diomede Island. Other original color prints and stone lithographs also featured Alaska wildlife and Native peoples.

The Silver Anniversary Committee of Juneau initiated a public art project to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Alaska statehood in 1984. Wallen's Windfall Fisherman, a life-size Alaska brown bear in bronze, was selected and stands near the Alaska Capitol. It was based on a 1974 stone lithograph of the same title. Another Alaska brown bear sculpture was commissioned by the DIPAC/Macaulay Salmon Hatchery in Juneau of a mother bear and three cubs, entitled Gang of Four.

To celebrate the 50th anniversary of Alaska Statehood in 2009,a group of private citizens formed a nonprofit organization to commission Wallen to create a life-scale humpback whale sculpture with waterworks to simulate the cascade of water off a breaching whale. After creating a maquette, Wallen scaled up the whale to one-third life size (eight feet) and cast the intermediate bronze for the University of Alaska Southeast in Juneau in 2013.

In 2011, Wallen began work on maquettes for a monumental bronze sculpture for the Lake Michigan shoreline between his hometown of Manitowoc and Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Entitled Spirit of the Rivers, the work consists of a Native American man portaging a birch bark canoe accompanied by a woman and an elder. The full-size figures are approximately 10 feet high. The sculpture celebrates the birch bark canoe as the origin of the maritime tradition in this region.

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