The Brooklyn Rail

John Walker is a substantive monograph on the British-born painter (b. 1939), providing the authoritative reference on the abstract artist’s achievements across six decades. Replete with lavish color illustrations, detailed exhibition histories and bibliographies, Touch is carried by a well-researched text by Catherine Lampert presented across six chronological chapters that weaves together biographical and artistic benchmarks with contemporaneous criticism. A summary essay by art historian Alex Bacon assesses Walker’s contributions to postwar painting from a contemporary vantage.

Touch successfully guides the reader through Walker’s peripatetic journeys in artmaking, from youthful explorations in his native Birmingham, UK to rapid recognition by critics and peers of the British art establishment during the 1960s and 1970s; a transformative stint in Australia where he interfaced with the mysterious processes of Aboriginal artmaking; and fecund periods in New York and finally Maine, where he now lives and works. The constant for Walker is reinventing from a favored repertoire of forms, such as the pinched “Alba” shape inspired by elements within Francisco de Goya’s The Dutchess of Alba of 1797. Throughout his career, Walker has maintained reverence for a core group of old master painters, and today he often works plein air. Thus, we come to understand his engagement with abstraction as a path to assimilate and reassemble forms drawn from observable sources, rather than exercises within a system that simply serves its own means.

The main corpus of Touch follows Walker’s formal trajectory, including his contributions in the UK to advancing the shaped canvas and large-scale multi-panel installations, which he often hung near the floor line to more fully engage the viewer physically. Importantly, Touch details and provides quality reproductions of Walker’s ephemeral wall drawings of the early-seventies; compositions in chalk (and in one instance, flour) approached like extemporaneous scribblings on a blackboard, complete with dust falling and drifting from the walls. Refreshingly, formalist accounts eventually give way to an intimate recollection by a former Boston University student, Russell Roberts, of Walker as a mentor with a keen eye for locating aesthetically-motivated form:

Somehow John could be simultaneously taciturn and expansive…. In one crit he taped off a small area of a painting and then left without anything said. I looked at that taped rectangle for days until I recognized what was in it that was unique to my work and how it offered a way to go forward.¹

Readers of the Brooklyn Rail may be most familiar with John Walker’s work of the past twenty-five years which is inextricably tied to the natural surrounds of coastal Maine that he began to appreciate when he assumed a professorship at Boston University in 1992. Equal parts rugged and refined, Maine has served as a wellspring for the color-rich outpourings of modernist painters ranging from Marsden Hartley to Nicole Wittenberg, and Walker’s visual affair with its coves and waterways—light, forms, textures and rich hues of color—is considered within the closing chapters The Dirty Cove and High Tide. From the outset, Walker has tended to work in large scale, however around 2005, upon discovery of a hoard of discarded bingo or “Beano” cards, as they are colloquially referred to in Maine, he began an alluring series of vest-pocket paintings that are equally rich in small format. For Walker, the journey of painting continues today, and his most recent work forwards an airiness and richly-colored optimism that pays tribute to his influences of the past sixty years (especially Aboriginal art) as it conveys a more simplified viewpoint that is the privilege of maturity. In the artist’s own words, “The ambition is use your hands and brush to create air, a glimpse of a body into a passage within a painting. To make a painting that lights up, like the smile of someone.”²