Oil Paint

Industrial surrealist painting that is framed in a wooden frame. The work is signed by the artist.

Tyler was born in 1944 in Texas City, on the gulf coast of Texas, a town dominated by a large oil refinery. His father ran an auto-body repair shop and was a skilled mixer of colors for car exteriors. Shortly after Valton's third birthday, a freighter in the port, loaded with more than 2,000 tons of ammonium nitrate (fertilizer), ignited and exploded, setting off massive fires as other ships, a nearby chemical plant and the refinery went up in flames. The blast shattered windows as far away as Houston and was felt 100 miles to the northeast, in Louisiana. "I was an infant but I remember it very well," Tyler says of what became known as the Texas City Disaster, the worst industrial incident of its kind in U.S. history. He says: "My parents thought it was the end of the world; the flames were bright red at the bottom of the fire, which covered the flat landscape, and black at the top, stretching high into the sky. I still have nightmares." A few years after the disaster, Tyler's father, who had received electric-shock treatments for depression before Valton was born, became an alcoholic and slipped deeper into mental-emotional gloom. Valton, who claims he had an out-of-body experience at the time of the Texas City fires and, later, as a teenager, was visited by an angel who pinned him to his bed (but pressed no special message upon him), would eventually drop out of high school. Later, he earned a high school diploma after moving with his mother and sister to Dallas; his older brother, Robert, an architectural draftsman, had already settled there.

H 11.5 in. x W 11.5 in. x D 1.5 in.

H 10.25 in x W 10.25 in.