Page 38 - Studio International - September 1968

John Walker's work since 1965

Richard Morphet

John Walker's prize at the John Moores exhibition in 1965 aroused presentation combining extraordinary immediate lucidity with com-
an interest in his work that has increased steadily, if in a slightly plex effect. The blatant contrasts of substance and touch underline
submerged manner, ever since. A11 too little of it has been seen, yet the peculiar distinctness of each pictorial element. Yet each painting,
among artists and critics there is widespread consensus as to its instead of falling apart, makes all the more compelling and unified
originality, while at the 1968 Young Contemporaries exhibition his the sense of a particular space in which a tightly devised series of
influence appeared especially marked (though without a correspond- encounters may be variously experienced. Variously, because each
ing access of quality). painting's size and the conflicting indications of perspective within it
Discussion of Walker's work has been disproportionately limited, make shifts in position and time specially necessary to read it fully.
and his use of a bold, direct and 'exposed' presentation to convey Thus Walker's shapes can combine an obsessive particularity, which
elusive and paradoxical effects may well underlie this fact. It is now their dense, sharply-defined concentrations of pigment accentuate,
generally seen that internal contradictions are a central and positive with marked openness of functional and associative role.
feature in a majority of new work. Walker's paintings bear this out, Late in 1966 Walker fixed upon the trapezoid format and the
but with refreshing critical obstacles added. For example, they do not depicted elements of trapeziums and rectilinear grid which since
fit easily into a group tendency (most at first sight obvious links with that time, despite departures, have been central in his work. During
other painters look, on examination, like differences). Nor, by con- the previous eighteen months, his work had passed through several
trast with many current works, do they concentrate their means into distinct but related phases in which elements successively appear
a single idiom. In terms of any purist aesthetic Walker mixes his which from late 1966 are employed in combination.
means intolerably and tempts the disasters of overcomplication and The painting awarded a prize at the 1965 John Moores exhibition
the dispersal of pictorial energies. Yet the combination of several was typical of a series of works on paper and canvas in which am-
techniques and formal ideas in a single painting always reveals a biguous individual images were disposed in front of a 'screen' of
freshness and tension that depend on a self-critical, disciplined pro- contiguous rectangles containing diagonally-intersecting lines. The
cedure and on the wish—for all the radiance of colour and complex contrast between the overall open but inflected background and
mood—to restrict expression in any work to the sparest vocabulary. closed-form images suspended in space pushed the images forward
Unexpectedly for paintings in 1968, Walker's work incorporates arrestingly. This was an original extension of the prevailing explora-
gestural handling, passages of thick impasto, and the superimposition tion of figure-ground relationships. Walker seemed to have increased
at some points of three different methods of paint application in a the tension between them; and he was rendering still more elusive
painting in which as many as five may be used altogether; also, the location and character of both figure and ground while simul-
strongly expressive emotional content is always immediately apparent, taneously drawing unusual attention to the matter-of-fact nature of
though the associations it embodies are as multiple as the formal each as substance on a particular surface. Several of the images in
interpretations to which each work is open. Moreover within an this phase were in fact collaged to the picture surface (enhancing
identifiable personal language of forms, improvisation is central to their almost uncomfortable independence of it and also their literal-
Walker's method, a fact quite evident even in the finished works. ness as figures), while the animated unevenness of pressure of the
Here, as elsewhere, Walker gives new value to a quality generally diagonal lines drew attention to their origin in concentrated spraying,
regarded as debased through over-use in a recent phase of painting. and thus to a close but ambiguous relationship with the canvas.
Anthony Caro said recently 'perhaps it's impossible to make a The parallelism of the lines was also irregular. Paradoxically they
sculpture out of clay at this moment, at the moment it's too difficult contributed at once both instability and discipline to the paint-
for me anyway—there are too many reminders in it. And I think one ing; their directness and vitality of touch and their rectilinear dis-
tries really to get a material with not too much art history in it...'1 junctions produced a stark restlessness, while these very disjunctions
Caro and Walker would probably join, where many would not, in were sufficiently regular to pin down the whole ground schematic-
feeling that no general principle can be erected on this sort of natur- ally. Finally, these paintings conveyed a high emotional charge which
ally recurrent reaction. Although Walker's process of painting ex- was concentrated by the contrasts in them—of restriction and crude
presses a close involvement, critical in character, with current work directness, of figure and ground, of suspension in space and of elusive
of other artists, he is resistant to the idea that any option as to techni- figurative identity. Walker's images appeared tattered, fluttering,
que or content can at a given period be counted closed. Any means truncated, trapped. The central folded image of this period (like
is welcome which increases a painting's presence; the more impossible a half-open page when it had one wing, or an envelope when it
and unacceptable the means by prevailing standards, the more had two) involved the idea of concealment. This image seemed to
awkward perhaps or the more superficially fatal to the painting's have come from nowhere and yet to be very specific. A steady activity
assertiveness or unity, the more positive it may often be. of drawing underlay these paintings— drawings rather hectic in
Thus in each painting Walker organizes difficult elements into a colour and in volume of incident, based on dramatic frames of strip