Walter Salas-Humara was born in New York City to Cuban parents and grew up in Florida where he began playing the drums at the age of seven. After a childhood playing in prog-rock and disco bands, Salas-Humara obtained a BFA from the University of Florida before moving to NYC to pursue a career as a visual artist, including a year of graduate work at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and steady work with with the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery. After 3 years in New York, however, he formed the band the Silos, and the band’s success cut short Salas-Humara’s visual art career. After touring around the country and producing over a dozen albums, he began painting again in the early 2000s. He currently lives and paints in New York City with his partner. “Painting is a peculiar miracle that I need to have again and again. I do not literally paint the horse, but the emotion it produces upon me. I focus on movement, texture and light. My goal is to recapture the mysterious by discovering the internal and external world anew. My renderings focus on emotive effect, rather than manifesting a sense of true physical space. I look at a horse and I see shape, color and tone. Then I find those that will make the work alive and vibrate. I have neither rules nor method. I look to art for a direct experience. I revel in the drag, the smear, the splash and flow of liquid color, in the physicality of the strokes. The shapes and hues assert themselves and interact with one another, as if in conversation. What I am seeking is not the real and not the unreal but rather the unconscious and the instinctive. I start a picture and I finish it. I don’t think about art while I work. I think about life.”​— Walter Salas-Humara