Doug Walker's moment of Zen arrived a few months ago when he was driving home from the Courtenay Home Depot store on a sunny afternoon and was just barely listening to a CBC interview on the car radio, when suddenly it hit him.

"I was the person being interviewed. I've listened to CBC Radio all my life, and there I was on national radio."

The broadcast was from a telephone interview the network had carried out with the garden sculptor a few weeks earlier, about which he had basically forgotten.

"I got 1,500 hits on my website that day, following the interview," he says. "I really, finally felt alive and truly came to believe that this thing I was doing was working."

"This thing" was a 25-month old venture into making a living as an artist. The interview broadcast told him it was beginning to pay off. It had viability.

Walker, who lives in the small rural community of Black Creek, about 20 kilometres north of Courtenay, describes himself as a "freestyle sculptor."

Walker's fanciful fabrications cannot be fully appreciated in a static state, but must be realized in full kinetic "performance" of water spurting or trickling through various outlets, turning wheels or spouting from bits of copper and brass as diverse as saxophones, trombones, tubas, water faucets and even golf trophies, all of which take on new reality as expressions of the intriguing, imaginative and slightly eccentric mind of their creator.

"I love my life," says Walker. "I mean, I absolutely love what I do. While other people of my age are either retiring, or obsessing about retiring, I am thinking about what I am going to do next, how I am going to express myself with a forthcoming creation. I think it's just great."

For a number of years, Walker had taken bits of wire and scraps of copper and brass, and fabricated small sculptures for his own pleasure and that of his wife, Jann, in their bucolic hideaway.

"At one point, I built a little pond, and I decided it would be nice to decorate it," he says. "I took the coil out of an old woodstove that I had found at a garage sale. It was blue and green from the heat of the stove. Then I drilled a few holes and hooked it up to a pump. A visitor saw it one day, and he wanted to buy it. I didn't want to let it go, so I told him I would make him one. I did, and that was the first sculpture I ever sold. Just yesterday, I sold No. 264."

From that first sale, Doug Walker's Waterworks Garden Sculpture not only became his metaphorical artist's canvas, it became a vibrant business that he believes will soon expand. He is quick to point out that he could never have done it alone.

"Jann really supports me," he says. "She is my business partner. She's a bookkeeper, thank God, because I could never handle the business end by myself. She also travels with me when we go to garden and home shows. That's invaluable, because the shows are a lot of work. We've done about 25 shows so far, and the big one on the horizon is the Filberg Festival in Comox on the August long-weekend. I would never miss that one."

Walker was no stranger to artistic expression in his earlier life. For many years he was a professional photographer -- "more of a paparazzo, to be honest" -- who also taught photojournalism at the University of Regina journalism school.

"It was funny, in a way," he says. "I was a high school dropout. I think I practically finished Grade 10, so I was the only person in the faculty without a degree, let alone without high school."

His specialty at Regina was fine arts photography, rather than the bread-and-butter bridal and baby pictures. To enlarge the family budget, he also worked for many years in the petroleum industry.

"After we moved to Black Creek, garden art became a kind of passion for me," he says. "I started hanging up shaped wire as sculptures, and began to devote my time to collecting trash, and then finding places to hide it while I worked out projects with it."

Walker cites two sculptors as mentors: Dan Doyle in Calgary, and Gerry Ruecker in Regina.

"I was heavily influenced by them. I think the mentorship process is essential for an artist. We gain expertise from being influenced by brilliant teachers, and then we forge out on our own creative paths."

Walker's garden sculptures are gaining considerable repute well beyond the confines of tiny Black Creek. Walker is particularly proud of the Capilano Suspension Bridge Treehouse Weather Station, which he describes as being a creation of metal and old gauges that is "fun and frivolous."

"My sculptures have now gone right across Canada, all the way to New Brunswick," he says. "I have sold items in Pennsylvania, California, Virginia, Durham, England and the Isle of Man. My website now gets between 15 and 20 hits a day."

While the pricetags on some of Walker's larger pieces can range as high as $3,000, there are smaller options for those on more limited budgets. Bird feeders begin at around $145, and what he calls his "bread-and-butter" sculptures are in the neighbourhood of $370.

"They're a little more pricey now," he says, "because the price of copper has gone up 280 per cent in the last year."

Walker travels far afield to find the raw materials for his amazing sculptures.

"The musical instruments I find in pawnshops, or hidden in closets of school bandrooms," he says. "I got my first big cache from a repair shop in Nanaimo. The guy had 30 horns and he said he would let me have them in return for a sculpture. Otherwise, I just scour the junk sales up and down the Island and on the Mainland."

The next few months will be busy for Walker. There's the big Bellevue, Wash. Arts Festival next weekend, which often attracts more than 300,000 people, then the aforementioned Filberg Festival at the beginning of August. He will also be doing the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show (by invitation), next February.

Ian Lidster is a Comox-based freelance writer and editor who can be reached at info@blbusinessgroup.com, or ian_l@shaw.ca.