John Walker: Touch, Catherine Lampert (Thames & Hudson)
In 1985, John Walker’s art was everywhere. He had a major exhibition of paintings at the Hayward Gallery and across the river at what is now Tate Britain a retrospective print exhibition, the inaugural show of their new print gallery. Both were accompanied by catalogues. The same year saw some work of his included in an exhibition of ‘Contemporary Drawings’ at Manchester’s Castlefield Gallery, and in late 1978 an exhibition of drawings at Nigel Greenwood. The little catalogue from that show was an eye-opener, showing how Walker made drawings from and not just for his paintings, an active way for an artist to understand what they have created.
And then Walker seemed to disappear. I found some old catalogues over the next couple of decades but saw no paintings in the flesh until the 2000s, when on a visit to Boston with a friend, a small gallery had some small blobby landscapes by John Walker on show. I wasn’t convinced it was the same artist but of course it was, I just hadn’t got a context for the work, had no idea Walker had visited or moved to Australia or America, couldn’t connect the paintings he had made that were 20 or 30 years apart.
There was an exhibition of his collage work in New York in 2005, that juxtaposed work from the 70s – huge, bold collaged canvasses – with more recent works on paper and in 2008 there was ‘A Survey: 1970-2008’ in Boston that showed the directions Walker had travelled in: from abstracts to figurative(ish) forms to skull-headed characters and the inclusion of text, to sometimes muddy seashore paintings. The small landscapes I’d been surprised by were painted on Bingo cards that Walker had found, the subject matter was a creek nearby, a place where land and tide and detritus collided. Some of the paintings seemed like close-ups of the mud and rubbish, others evocative moonlit scenes, and others seemed intent on recreating the swirl and flow of the water itself.
What has been missing, of course, was a monograph, something that Thames & Hudson have now put right. This handsome 300+ page hardback makes clear the long-term development of Walker’s art and offers readers useful biographical information and critical insight. But the book makes clear it is the art that matters; it opens with 10 full page reproductions of work, followed by a black and white studio shot of Walker painting.
After a brief introduction, we are told the bare bones of Walker’s youth in Birmingham, and by the end of less than a page column of text he is, at sixteen, off to Birmingham School of Art. There are brief descriptions of the artist’s engagement with work by Francis Bacon, Munch and Kenneth Noland and then we are witness to perhaps the first important paintings, which feature depictions of a cut and folded square of paper against a glitched all-over grid pattern. By the end of the 60s Walker was exhibiting shaped canvasses (mostly parallelograms or truncated triangles, a kind of wooden gym horse shape) in major galleries, including the Hayward, and some of the parallelogram shapes had transferred onto regular rectangular canvasses along with a new shape, a kind of lozenge or pill, often on long, thin paintings that were impossible to see all at once.
Walker then landed a two year fellowship in the USA, traveling widely, making connections, seeing many important museum and gallery collections, and – of course –painting. And in 1972 he showed at the Venice Biennale and in a number of important group exhibitions. In 1974, he made a series of paintings, all titled Durham, with a number following, that used the lozenge shape again, along with rough outlines of rectangles and squares to make a small tower, bottom right of each canvas, against a textured, colourful background. To me, these are related to works by the likes of John Hoyland, exploring the dynamics of shape, colour and form, finding out how to energise large flat areas.
Ostraca II, 1977 (Courtesy of The Phillips Collection)
One way of doing this, was collage, with dynamic physical shapes reacting against each other, highlighting even more the surface of a painting. Although collage would remain part of Walker’s available toolkit, by the end of the 70s, he was concentrating on a motif he called ‘Alba’, an abstract geometric rendering of the human form, also reminiscent of standing stones or megaliths. The artist and his work also had to process and assimilate a residency in Australia: the vast landscape, the desert, the sense of space and perhaps most importantly, Aboriginal art that he was allowed to see and their relationship with and understanding of the land. Paintings such as ‘For T. Summerfield’ clearly show a change of palette in response, whilst others such as ‘Cultures Oceania VII’ grapple with ideas of colonialism, with a skull on a stick beside an Alba shape covered with handprints. Totems and words (spells? incantations? poetry?) also started to appear, although by the 90s, Walker was struggling to clarify his work, seeking a directness he had found in Aboriginal drawing yet unable to resolve his paintings; indeed, feeling unable to paint for long stretches of time.
The anguish partly stemmed from emotional as much as painterly reasons. Catherine Lampert gamely tries to unravel the knots that tie Walker’s father, trench warfare, death, creek mud and a story involving a sheep’s skull, but to no avail. I find this work cluttered, weighed down by words painted on the canvasses and perhaps also by the rather obvious symbolism of the skull. It’s a world away from the thin washes and weightless colours that Richard Diebenkorn used in his Ocean Park series, yet Lampert reveals that Walker would sometimes stop, en route to Australia, to visit Diebenkorn in Los Angeles, intrigued by the relationship between abstraction and a sense of place, order and nature. This, along with visits to Maine meant that having previously bought a house there in 1989, he could challenge himself to draw and paint out in the landscape.
Enter the horizon line, across the top of several paintings, along with depictions of mud and what is buried in it, the pattern of marks left by clammers, shadows, smoke, water and cloud. There is still a sense of struggle in many of these paintings, they were not made easily; the paint is dense and layered, any imagery unclear. Perhaps the strongest work from ‘the dirty cove’ are the more monochrome work such as ‘Sea Cake, Winter No. IV’, where black erupts towards a starry sky and full moon; or ‘Clammer’s Moon’, a work that uses oil and mixed media to good effect, the paint bubbling, bleeding and blurring from the mix of materials.
Move, 2017 (courtesy of Alexandre Gallery)
Something changed in the 2010s. Colour clarified, shapes resolved into formal patterns and many of the paintings become simpler and less cluttered. Stripes and dots and forms are freely painted, with a sense of looseness, perhaps even joy rather than struggle. I am reminded of Roger Hilton’s exuberant work, of cartoon colours and capers, and occasionally of the work of Frank Stella, yet not as sombre or hard edged. Walker is now able to draw on a whole lifetime of shapes and techniques and forms and colour. His lozenge shape reappears in ‘Move’ and possibly ‘Bridge’ and ‘Shift’, as do the meanders and pools of his creek. There are acres of blue and white, patterns abutting one another, lines interrupting themselves and each other. Lampert suggests (about a specific painting but I think it more generally applicable) ‘There is so much space and air in the work, nevertheless it has a different kind of depth, as if all is feeling far away, lost in the firmament.’
Alex Bacon, in a short piece of writing which ends the book, puts it another way, suggesting that Walker ‘shows how to leave room for the viewer to reflect on themselves in the act of coming to terms with the cacophony of complex moves the artist has made, with all their provocative ambiguity and open-endedness.’ The double-page studio shot which closes the book shows clearly that the (absent) artist continues to explore possibilities. The walls and floor are covered with drawings and paintings, ideas and work in progress. This book quite rightly celebrates John Walker and is a glorious and extensive survey of his work.
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Rupert Loydell
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