Walter Pence

Walter Pence (1942–2025) was a painter whose five-decade body of work (1970–2025) used his own changing visage as an anchor for a lifetime of bold stylistic experimentation across different mediums and vivid colors. Best known for eclectic, high-energy self-portraits, he also produced a smaller number of landscapes, still lifes, and abstract pieces that revealed his engagement with the external world and pure form. His posthumous retrospective 'Walter Pence: The Mirror and the Window: Self-Portraits and Selected Works, 1970–2025' runs at the Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka through September 6, 2026.