Even though he makes his living mostly by painting horses, when he saw a picture of the building, professional artist Nick Walters knew he had to paint Adair County’s historic courthouse.
“(I was) looking through some old pictures of different things, and I saw it, and I thought it was a cool building,” Walters said.
Growing up, Walters learned to draw by doodling as a student in class, but he has experimented with different creative outlets in the interim between notebook sketches and horse paintings.
“I started painting like eight years ago. I have a degree in English – creative writing was the focus – I went to UK and I actually used to write a music column for the Kentucky Colonel. I’ve always enjoyed making stuff.”
Part of “making stuff” was playing guitar in the punk band, Those Crosstown Rivals, who toured across the United States. Difficulties arose with the touring lifestyle, however, which led Walters to eventually trade his guitar pick for a paintbrush. And since taking up painting, Walters has primarily found himself doing commission work on horses.
“I do a lot of horse commissions. Living in Lexington, you’ve got to paint some horses,” Walters said of his career.
His subjects have included everything from beloved family horses to Derby racers. Safe to say, Walters doesn’t do a lot of architecture, which is why the attention he put on the Adair County Courthouse is so significant– even though Walters admits he was not sure what the building was when he first came across it in the “old pictures” he mentioned.
“I didn’t even know what it was exactly,” Walters said regarding when he found the photograph. “And looking into it, I thought it was interesting how most of the time, new architecture and stuff, they’re adding onto things. But then I saw how they had taken off part of it to make it its original form, which I found very interesting. Especially something like a municipal building.”
Drawn not just to the courthouse’s story, Walters was also inspired by the architecture, saying, “If a new building is made, it’s probably just going to be a rectangle or a square with some windows. But the way (the courthouse) is made, it has all the windows, there is some curvature around them. One of the things I didn’t know until recently is one of the columns has a head carved into it. Just stuff like that. Nobody would ever do that today.”
As it turns out, by coincidence, Walters had seen the courthouse in his childhood and simply did not recognize the structure.
Walters and his father used to go hunting in Columbia in his youth, and they passed by the famed courthouse multiple times. The building did not mean as much to him, both given his age and not being from Columbia, but upon rediscovering it, he knew he not only had to paint it—he had to do right by it.
“I just hope that I did the courthouse justice,” he said. “Mom says I need to paint more architecture.”
By Kenley Godby
kenley@adairvoice.com
