john walker

8/10/2019 John Walker

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JOHN WALKER


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J O H N W A L K E R

I N C O M I N G T I D E

SMALL PAINTINGS FROM SEAL POINT, MAINE

ESSAY BY

C H R I S T O P H E R R I O P E L L E , C U R AT O R

T H E N A T I O N A L G A L L E R Y , L O N D O N

OFFER WATERMAN & C O

WAQAS WAJAHAT NEW YORK


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SEAL POINT SERIES

By Christopher Riopelle

The decisions John Walker made about the Seal Point series he began to paint in 2006 started long before he ever picked up a brush. They got

underway when he discovered an old set of Beano, or Bingo, cards in a studio he was using at Walpole on the Maine seacoast. Maine is a favouritesummer retreat of Walkers a few hours drive from Boston where he lives and teaches. Impregnated with the salt air after years of summer use,

the cards inevitably evoke rainy afternoons, or the slow-moving August hours as daylight fades into night, when long-ago vacationers wiled awaytime over a convivial parlour game. Walker determined to use the cards as the supports for a series of oil sketches instead. He would survey the

landscape at Seal Point adjacent to Walpole, its distinctive conjunction of water and rock, eddies and pools, scudding clouds and distant, darting

sailboats.

Vertically-oriented, the cards measure only 71/4 x 51/2 inches (18.5 x 14 centimetres), minute in comparison with the large-scale canvasses the

artist usually employs. Unlike them, the cards are easily transportable. Each is imprinted with a grid of squares and random numbers ve high

and ve across, one per square. Made of unprimed cardboard, they respond to paint differently from canvas; where the oil-rich medium is

absorbed, the grid and numbers continue to show through; where paint is more thickly applied, grid and numbers disappear beneath the surface, as ifsubmerged, but there none the less.

In one sense, the Beano cards are classic found objects of a kind artists have incorporated into their works since the early twentieth century, in

order to exploit the rich associations that cling to the detritus of modern life. Think of the newspaper headlines in a Cubist Picasso collage. They

pull us back insistently to daily life. Walker was not particularly interested in the chains of allusion such appropriations set in motion, although

he would not dispute that they are there. Rather, he exploited the fact that all Beano cards are alike. Their small scale makes them suitable for

landscape oil sketches. Their consistent size, vertical orientation, and printing in an unvarying pattern, impose conditions on painting which he

simply accepted. When the card is narrower than the span of a hand, brushstrokes must be small, to name only the most obvious factor, and Walker

is used to painting big.

Compare it with a poet who accepts the limitations of a given poetic form, the Shakespearean sonnet, say, with its fourteen iambic pentameters in

stanzas of eight and six lines. Such limits in no way restrict vision but open up worlds of expressive potential in small compass. Walker was aiming

for something like that narrowing of scope; at the same time, landscape has always been a latent presence in even his most exuberant abstractions,

and he was returning to roots in nature.

Walker draws attention here to the essential characteristics of the landscape oil sketch. In addition to small scale, a dedication to the truth of visual

experience, and quickness of execution, they include multiplicity; artists almost always paint many landscape oil sketches rather than just a few,

and the Seal Point series now numbers some 200 jewel-like paintings. Moreover, there is a long-standing connection between the oil sketch and

art pedagogy. A distinguished teacher, Walker already uses the Seal Point sketches in lectures1. More than that, as free-wheeling annotations of a

specic landscape at a given time of year but under changing atmospheric conditions, they demonstrate the intimate relationship of the oil sketch

to abstraction.

Landscape oil sketches seem to have emerged on the artistic scene suddenly, in and around Rome in the 1770s. The principal protagonists

were a Frenchman, Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750-1819), and a Welshman, Thomas Jones (1742-1803), both studying in Italy at the time.

Intriguingly, they seem never to have met or known what the other was up to. It is as if Pollock and de Kooning never ran into one another in

downtown Manhattan, and eighteenth-century Rome was a much smaller place than that. More-or-less simultaneously, however, both men began

to paint oil studies on stiff paper out of doors in nature. Neither had any intention of producing nished works of art but wanted to train the eye

to capture the eeting effects of light and atmosphere as they played over the landscape.


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Valenciennes recommended that the artist work fast and spend no more than an hour or so per study. He also advised students that certain motifs

fallen tree trunks, rushing water, drifting clouds offered the most demanding challenges; master them and the landscape painter would secure

himself a repertoire of skills to last a career. Jones, for his part, radically limited the scope of his motifs to old and utterly unassuming plaster walls

as seen from adjacent rooftops. Here were paintings that seemed to eschew composition. What order there was reected the random sequence of

forms in space. Valenciennes, drawn to theory, was the rst to write about the landscape oil sketch, and he used them as pedagogic tools when he

returned to an inuential academic career in Paris. Jones, on the other hand, stored his sketches in a Welsh attic. When they suddenly emerged

150 years later, in 1954, an astonished world wanted to know where these utterly original, proto-photographic images had come from2.

Soon, the landscape oil sketch played a central role in the training of landscape painters across Europe, and eventually in America as well. John

Constable (1776-1837) was the leading exponent in England. His sketches of clouds dancing across Hampstead Heath were seen to embody a

freshness of perception which characterises the English landscape tradition as a whole. (It is this pragmatic tradition in which Walker was formed.)

The Frenchman Camille Corot (1796-1875) made oil sketches on trips to Italy and back in France as well and, as they were widely distributed among

students and admirers, they came to exert a powerful inuence on the ways generations of French landscape painters went about their work. For

both artists, they were private notations, for reference and discussion in the studio among peers. The Impressionists in part icular were admirers,

however, and it was they who reconciled the aesthetic of rapid, improvisatory painting with nished works meant for public consumption.

By the late nineteenth century it became difcult to think of the abbreviated landscape sketch as a separate category of painting, so fully had it

been assimilated into Impressionism. Its central role in teaching faded too. And then with the rise of abstraction the necessity for the painter to

make reference to the natural world faded as well. The oil sketch survived in our times primarily as the province of Sunday painters, many of whom

Walker might well have observed optimistically setting up their easels along the Maine coast. Such amateurs remained wedded to the natural world

and for the most part harboured no pretensions to public recognition. But they kept a tradition alive.

In this context Walkers return to the landscape oil sketch achieves its resonance. Looking from card to card we soon recognise the elements of

the artists landscape vision. Quick strokes of paint evoke foreground rocks here. Curving swirls of pigment suggest pools of water caught among

sea-smoothed boulders there. Clouds meander along the horizon, while pointillist icks of pure colour dancing across the sheet call to mind the

erratic paths of itting birds.

Some images are relatively spare while others teem with incident. Many sketches are dominated by horizontal brushstrokes while in others linesmeander crazily across the picture surface. Some sketches are dominated by colour harmonies in green or pink or blue, suggestive of specic times

of day and the constant alternations of sun and cloud across the coastal landscape. Darker tonalities evoke the long, slow waning of light at end

of day. There are no dramatic sunset effects here, as far as I can tell, as on the Maine seashore, youre looking to the east and the sun goes down

behind you. Rather, the more diffuse effects of that diminishing light spill back over you from behind.

Despite the small size, we are often looking at vast expanses of land and sea here. It is also evident and much of the invigorating energy of the

paintings comes from the fact that Walker has worked fast, not letting a second escape him as he rushed with improvisatory glee to take down

the endlessly transitory minutiae that nature spread out for his delectation.

But now the implications of Walkers use of Beano cards come clear. By the mid-nineteenth century artists were able to buy pre-stretched

canvasses in various sizes and three standard formats. The French referred to them as paysage (horizontal, suitable for landscape painting);

marine(more emphatically horizontal, good for the sea); andgure(vertical, adapted to portraits)3.


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ALL PLATES ACTUAL SIZE

Seal Point Series

2005-2009Oil on Bingo/Beano card71/4x 51/2inches (18.5 x 14 cm)


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The Beano card is a gure format. Walker has chosen to paint landscapes on supports whose shape traditionally was not seen as conducive

to these genres. (He is certainly not the rst one to do so.) As landscape artists have long known, however, a vertical format means that the

elements of the landscape are stacked up abruptly one atop another, like Donald Judd Boxes. Rather than suggesting a slow, steady sweep

from foreground to horizon, as a horizontal canvas can, here near and far collapse together and transitions in space become staccato and oddly

insistent. The German Romantic master Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the majority of whose landscapes are horizontally disposed,

consistently used vertical- format canvasses, however, for his cliff-top scenes when he wanted to suggest the rapid, all but instantaneous transition

from foreground to the sea below. The eye, used to the relaxed ow of space of conventional landscape painting, has to work that much harder tointerpret a landscape rendered vertically.

The squared-off grid of the cards also plays its role. An old artists trick instructs painters to set up a wooden frame gridded with string in front of a

motif. The device instantly reduces perspectival recession to a two-dimensional pattern which the hand and eye of the artist can transpose, almost

mechanically, onto a sheet of paper or canvas. Not that Walker was performing any such sleight of hand, but the presence of the grid and numbers,

more or less submerged from card to card, but never entirely absent, necessarily recalls the strategy. At the same time it reinforces the sense of the

painting as simultaneously a landscape and a at pattern of colours. In short, it accentuates the integrity of the picture plane, long a central concern

of abstract painting. Similarly, the varying thickness of the paint in any given picture, sometimes soaked into the card, otherwise standing proud of

the surface, sets the abstract qualities of paint handling into dynamic tension with the demands of representation. Walkers ability to sustain that

tension in any given painting and across the series as a whole are among the signal pleasures of this series.

The Beano cards, nally, are similar in shape to the large-scale, vertically aligned canvasses on which Walker often paints his abstractions. A recent

studio photograph shows grids of Seal Point sketches arrayed along a wall of Walkers Boston studio along with other works perhaps six times

larger; further along the wall a painting of the same shape but sixty or seventy times larger also leans. The image reinforces the sense of continuity

in Walkers painting practice and a strong and immediate reciprocity between the landscape sketches, hand-held objects of the greatest intimacy

and directness, and the pulsating, large-scale paintings, sweeping in their intensity, which punctuate Walkers long career.

Preparing for his 1932 retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthaus Zurich, which he installed himself, Picasso was asked how he intended to hang

the show. Badly, he replied, as indeed in conventional terms he did, ignoring any semblance of chronology or thematic consistency. Picasso had

something more complicated in mind for, as he explained, What counts is the consistency in ideas.4 Walkers Seal Point series reminds us of the

magisterial consistency in his own production. Whether working on a large scale or small, whether as an abstractionist or an observer of nature,his twin allegiances to observed reality and formal invention never waver.

christopher riopelle is the Curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery, London

1 In an on-line blog of 20 July 2007 Chris Jagers, a student, described how Walker illustrated a talk at Brookhaven College, Dallas, TX with 40 or so small

paintings from his on-going Seal Point series that he brought with him and pinned on the wall! Jagers said of the experience: I felt a deep urge to go out and

start painting.2 On the early history of the landscape oil sketch, see P. Galassi, Before Photography: Painting and the Invention of Photography. New York, 1981; C. Riopelle and

X. Bray,A Brush with Nature: The Gere Collection of Landscape Oil Sketches.London, 1999; andPaysages dItalie: Les peintres du plein air (1780-1830), sous la

direction de A. Ottani Cavina. (Exh. cat.) Paris, 2001.3 On canvas formats in the nineteenth century and the general availability of manufactured art supplies, see D. Bomford, et al, Art in the Making: Impressionism.

London, 1990, especially pp.32-50.4 Quoted in J. Eldereld, Picassos Extreme Czanne in J. Rishel and K. Sachs, ed., Czanne and Beyond(Exh. cat.) Philadelphia, 2009, p. 223.


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SELECTED CHRONOLOGY


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1939 Born November 12, Birmingham, England.

1956-60 Studied at Birmingham School of Art.

1961-63 Studied at Acadmie de la Grande Chaumire, Paris.

1962-69 Taught at Stourbridge College of Art, West Midlands.

Taught at Birmingham School of Art.

Taught at St. Martins School of Art, London.

Taught at Royal College of Art, London.

1969-71 Resided in New York as recipient ofHarkness Fellowship.

1972-78 Tutor, Royal College of Art, London.

1974-75 Professor of Painting and Drawings, The Cooper Union, New York.

Professor of Painting and Drawings, New York Studio School.

1975 Visiting Artist, Columbia University, New York.

1975-77 Visiting Professor, Yale University Graduate School of Art and Architecture, New Haven.

1976 Awarded John Moores Prize for Contemporary Art.

1977-78 Artist-in-Residence, St. Catherines College, Oxford University.

1979 Visiting Artist, Monash University, Melbourne.

1980 Artist-in-Residence, Prahran College of Advanced Education, Melbourne.

1982-86 Dean, School of Art, Victoria College of the Arts, Melbourne.

1989 Visiting Professor, Yale University Graduate School of Art and Architecture, New Haven.

1992 - present Professor of Graduate Painting, College of Fine Arts, Boston University.

Director of the Graduate Painting Program, College of Fine Arts, Boston University.

Resides and works in Boston and Walpole, Maine.


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SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, AustraliaA t C il f G t B it i L d E l d


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Arts Council of Great Britain, London, EnglandArt Institute Chicago, Chicago, ILAustralian National Gallery, Canberra, AustraliaBowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, ME

Birmingham City Art Galleries, Birmingham, EnglandBritish Council, London, EnglandThe British Museum, London, EnglandCleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OHDurham University Museum, Durham, EnglandFarnsworth Art Museum & Wyeth Center, Rockland, MEFogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, MAHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DCHerbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NYLeeds City Art Gallery, Leeds, EnglandLeeds University Art Collection, Leeds, EnglandThe Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

Middlesborough City Art Gallery, Middlesborough, EnglandMIT-List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MAMuseum am Ostwall, Dortmund, GermanyMuseum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, ILMuseum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CAMuseum of Fine Arts, Boston, MAMuseum of Fine Arts, Houston, TXMuseum of Modern Art, New York, NYNational Gallery of Art, Washington, DCNational Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, AustraliaNeuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, NYThe Phillips Collection, Washington, DCScottish National Gallery of Modern Art and Dean Gallery, Edinburgh, ScotlandSolomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NYSouthampton City Art Gallery, Southampton, EnglandSt. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MOThe Tate Gallery, London, EnglandTrevelyan College, Durham University (Dining Hall Commission), Durham, EnglandUlster Museum, Belfast, Northern IrelandUniversity of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI

Victoria and Albert Museum, London, EnglandVirginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VAWhitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT


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O F F E R W A T E R M A N & C O

WAQAS WAJAHAT NEW YORK

john walker

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