Walter Rane:Mormon Artist
Walter Rane is an American painter and illustrator. He is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, often inadvertently called the Mormon or LDS Church.
Born September 8, 1949, in National City, California, he was fascinated with art as a young boy. Someone gave him a paint-by-numbers set when he was nine years old, and he remembers that he threw away the “numbers and started using the paints.”[1] Rane studied figure drawing at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles where he earned his BFA with “Great Distinction.” He lived and worked in Paris, France, with his family in 1984–1985. During his early career, he worked as a freelance illustrator in New York and Connecticut, with such clients as Reader’s Digest, Time, Life, and National Geographic, Random House, and The Rockefeller Group.
In the early 1990s, The Church of Jesus Christ asked him to create works of art on religious themes. He has painted scenes from the Book of Mormon and events from the life of Jesus Christ. According to his website, “his work has expanded into more personal subjects, including scriptural themes. . . . Within the scriptures, he finds profound messages and truths concerning life’s experiences which inspire images that express his own deeply held beliefs.”
His work has been exhibited on the East and West Coasts, and Utah. He has permanent collections at the Museum of Church History and Art in Salt Lake City, Utah; the Springville Museum of Art in Springville, Utah; and Southern Virginia University in Buena Vista, Virginia.
Rane lives with his wife, Linda, in Oregon. They have four sons, three daughters-in-law, and one granddaughter.
