We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Walter Redondo a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Walter, thanks for joining us today. Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

At a young age I always sensed I had an inkling to create artistically. However, I was guided into the world of sports due to my families circumstances. When I was 7 years old I began playing tennis on a regular basis and excelled quickly. By the time I was 12 I was already the number one player for my age division in SoCal. I would go on to be 1 in the nation at 16 years old. During this time when I had opportunities I loved to create. In school teachers would have me decorate their boards and this was something I always looked forward to. But I was fully invested in my tennis career and did not yet have a pathway to explore my artistic potential. When I turned pro, my tennis career didnt take off the way I had thought it would. I was successful as a junior but translating it over to the pros served as a challenge. I spent my early 20s going tournament to tournament trying to “make it”. Those years were met with not only on court challenges but off court challenges as well. I began starting to paint and sketch more while I was on the road for events. Once I was in my late twenties, after dealing with a loss of someone very close to me and getting injured, I decided to close the chapter on playing tennis. During this time, I went searching deeply for something to enrich my soul. I found God and I found this desire to fully express and create. After spending most of my life being taught to hit inside the lines and play structured tennis, I wanted to paint outside the lines. I developed an abstract style which allowed me to express in the freest way. It was at this time I realized I was being led to make this my full time profession.

Walter, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Once I had made the decision to become an artist full time, the first step was just painting for the joy of expressing. Then and now I paint for one thing, to achieve my full potential that God has given me. I went from spending my whole life being seen as this world class tennis player to now learning and understanding the world in which an artist creative can make a living. I was never formally taught how to paint or create, and it was better this way. With tennis, every detail was so meticulous it would cause a sensation of needing to be perfect or else it was not successful. So when I started to create, I wanted to leave this perfectionism behind. I don’t want to be tainted by form or structure, but achieving the freedom to paint with the intuition God has graced me with. As I began painting and finding my true style, I soon discovered that my tennis career would actually serve a deeper purpose for my art than I had ever imagined. The tennis community loved art and it created the pathway for my art to slowly be seen. While I was painting, I was still teaching tennis to help make a living. During one of my group classes, my student Roy Sumner shared how he owned an art gallery. He started to show my work and from there one thing led to another. I started doing private shows, art walks, other galleries started representing me, showrooms exhibited me and so on.

Over the years of painting professionally I’ve grown into my own style. All my works speak of faith, family, community, relationship and life. I want my art to be the vessel which God uses me through. I desire for the work I produce to speak to people and impact them.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

As I’ve mentioned before, my ultimate goal is to achieve the full potential God has given for me. I want my art to have a direct emotional impact with the viewer. When people listen to music you often hear how they are moved or the words spoke to their soul. I want to create the same influence without the use of sound. How do I as an artist who is not painting realism, do this through abstraction. That is my goal every day. Ultimately, the goal is to get my art as far as it can go and for me this is getting into museums. As a tennis player the goal was to get into the grandslams. As an artist, it’s to get into museums and reach as many as possible through my work. Every canvas I start, is on the mission to exceed anything I’ve ever produced before, to create something unlike any other.

What’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative in your experience?

With every show I’ve done or opportunity I’ve had to showcase my work I am still blessed by the amount of appreciation my work receives. Every time someone takes the moment to stop and spend time studying my work or asking about what it represents always encourages me. Over the years I’ve had people cry when viewing my art. Some have shared the emotion and what they see in the art reminded them of a loved one that had passed on. Others have expressed just an overwhelming sense of emotions. I have painted for this. I have prayed that God use my work to speak into the hearts of those who view it, so to know people are being impacted in that way is extremely rewarding.

Contact Info:

• Website: Walterredondo.com
• Instagram: Walterredondo
• Tiktok: walterredondoart