'SHAHIDS' - Acrylic

Artist Statement

Thank you for your time in the consideration of my work.

I, Walter Sebastian Adler, am a New York City native. Relatively early in my life made the mistakes of holding subversive political views, undertaking the practice of paramedicine and becoming serially involved with women from the former Soviet Union. Thus my adventures on ambulances, in idealistic efforts and using my pen as matter of record have managed to craft many manuscripts based upon the things I have seen. Largely influenced by New York Noire Futurism and Post Soviet Realism. Mostly influenced by those I have loved and struggled beside.

My life has been punctuated with other people’s violence. I spent my coming of age years in Israel at the height of the second Intifada. I was nearly murdered in a pogrom by a mob on a subway train. Rescued by a Bangladeshi Muslim, a Russian girlfriend and my own two fists. I served in the FDNY four years as an Emergency Medical Specialist. I spent five years smuggling medical supplies and training Haitian dissidents as paramedics. I studied international development with dissident radicals, technocrats and NGO workers from across the world. I have served the Kurdish movement in Iraq and Syria. I worked on the front lines of the Covid-19 Pandemic.

I am trying to capture in words the explicit violence of a world my American people have no idea is real. I try in my manuscripts to craft a future America where the violence of past and present times is here and the mountain is less secure. Each manuscript is from a different period, but all of them use those I have known well to paint what I can never with enough stories capture: the blackness of misery in the world beyond our gates and the intrigues & aspirations of the refugees who arrive here.