Page 44 - Studio International - December 1972

work of the Dada period, in particular like diagrams. The right balance is so clearly Other recent drawings, though small in size,
the drawn knowledge systems of Picabia and there in Reflections. . . that much of the other have employed the metal screen device familiar
(especially) Duchamp. The very compact and work in the show appeared as adjuncts, as from much larger paintings. At the IKON
individual nature of her work in the exhibition additional information. This was despite the GALLERY, Birmingham, last month Walker
at NIGEL GREENWOOD entitled 'Locations' fact that there were a number of extremely developed the relationship between his drawing
seems again to be oddly in accord with that interesting pictorial ideas, a nicely original and painting in an unexpected and ambitious
period and that style. For it was of course in touch with the collaged photographs, and manner, by enlarging the drawings to the full
Dada, and nowhere else, that we find maps and some beautiful brushwork. 0 size of his paintings and by doing them
plans as abstract and deviously cognitive directly onto the walls of the gallery, in chalk,
elements of art. Rita Donagh's paintings, as the John Walker's painting has always made on areas of the wall which had been prepared
title of the exhibition indicates, are practically use of a great variety of surface effects, from as blackboards. The drawings were beginning
all to do with mapping and planning and the most delicate washes and powdery coatings to be damaged a day after they were finished,
plotting, and then getting this information into to thickly-built layers and craggy passages that were looking as wrecked as yesterday's
the picture. Reflections . . . is still the best work were the result of forcing paint through wire buttonhole after a week, and were then painted
there, although a later painting, Location, is netting, then pulling it up into congealed out to make way for the next show. It was a
notable. Two earlier pictures provide some tackiness. At the same time, he has always been unique occasion, not merely because of the
interesting glimpses into the kind of working a draughtsman, and the making of drawings has short life span of the works, but because of
methods that must have gone into the been integral to his whole activity as an artist. their evident high quality and quite noble
production of Reflections, and one would guess These works have characteristically been in assumption of a status normally accorded only
from these that a problem with the painting crayon, pastel, charcoal, the more painterly to painting. It seemed that the peculiar
is to know how spare, on the one hand, and materials. Some recent drawings, such as that nature of the support and the medium,
how fully painted, on the other, these canvases reproduced on the cover of the June issue of together with the question of the scale of the
should be. Too much paintwork makes them this journal, were done in chalk on a paper thick work, and its proximity to oblivion, dramatized
lose their precise and delicate character, while as canvas which was essentially primed and matters of a purely formal and of a generally
the emptier pictures look a little too much underpainted by the all-over black ground. expressive type which are essential to Walker's

John Walker, Sometime 1972, chalk on wall prepared as blackboard, 10 ft X 20 ft, Ikon Gallery

238