John Walker is an
EnglishEngland is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
painterPainting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a surface . The application of the medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush but other objects can be used. In art, the term painting describes both the act and the result of the action. However, painting is...
and
printAn old master print is a work of art produced by a printing process within the Western tradition . A date of about 1830 is usually taken as marking the end of the period whose prints are covered by this term. The main techniques concerned are woodcut, engraving and etching, although there are...
maker.
Walker studied in
BirminghamBirmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
. Some of his early work was inspired by
abstract expressionismAbstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
and
post-painterly abstractionPost-painterly abstraction is a term created by art critic Clement Greenberg as the title for an exhibit he curated for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1964, which subsequently travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Art Gallery of Toronto....
, and often combined apparently three-dimensional shapes with "flatter" elements. These pieces are usually rendered in
acrylic paintAcrylic paint is fast drying paint containing pigment suspension in acrylic polymer emulsion. Acrylic paints can be diluted with water, but become water-resistant when dry...
.
In the early 1970s, Walker made a series of large
Blackboard Pieces using
chalkChalk is a soft, white, porous sedimentary rock, a form of limestone composed of the mineral calcite. Calcite is calcium carbonate or CaCO3. It forms under reasonably deep marine conditions from the gradual accumulation of minute calcite plates shed from micro-organisms called coccolithophores....
and the
Juggernaut works which also use dry
pigmentA pigment is a material that changes the color of reflected or transmitted light as the result of wavelength-selective absorption. This physical process differs from fluorescence, phosphorescence, and other forms of luminescence, in which a material emits light.Many materials selectively absorb...
. From the late 1970s, his work maked allusions to earlier painters, such as
Francisco GoyaFrancisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown, and through his works was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era...
,
Edouard ManetÉdouard Manet was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism....
and
Henri MatisseHenri Matisse was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter...
, either through the quoting of a pictorial motif, or the use of a particular technique. Also during this time, he began to use
oil paintOil paint is a type of slow-drying paint that consists of particles of pigment suspended in a drying oil, commonly linseed oil. The viscosity of the paint may be modified by the addition of a solvent such as turpentine or white spirit, and varnish may be added to increase the glossiness of the...
more in his work. His paintings of the 1970s are also notable for what has come to be termed
canvasCanvas is an extremely heavy-duty plain-woven fabric used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, and other items for which sturdiness is required. It is also popularly used by artists as a painting surface, typically stretched across a wooden frame...
collageA collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
— the application of glued-on, separately painted patches of canvas to the main canvas (see the external link below for an example and image).
After spending some time in
AustraliaAustralia , officially the Commonwealth of Australia, is a country in the Southern Hemisphere comprising the mainland of the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania, and numerous smaller islands in the Indian and Pacific Oceans. It is the world's sixth-largest country by total area...
, Walker got a position at the Victoria College of the Arts in
MelbourneMelbourne is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2009, the greater...
. He produced the
Oceania series around this time which incorporates elements of native
OceanicOceania is a region centered on the islands of the tropical Pacific Ocean. Conceptions of what constitutes Oceania range from the coral atolls and volcanic islands of the South Pacific to the entire insular region between Asia and the Americas, including Australasia and the Malay Archipelago...
art.
Walker is currently the head of the graduate painting program at
Boston UniversityBoston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...
.
Walker won the 1976 John Moores Painting Prize and was nominated for the
Turner PrizeThe Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner, is an annual prize presented to a British visual artist under the age of 50. Awarding the prize is organised by the Tate gallery and staged at Tate Britain. Since its beginnings in 1984 it has become the United Kingdom's most publicised...
in 1985.
In September 2010, Walker and five other British artists including
Howard HodgkinSir Gordon Howard Eliot Hodgkin CH, CBE is a British painter and printmaker. His work is most often associated with abstraction.-Early life:...
,
John HoylandJohn Hoyland RA was a London-based British artist. He was one of the country's leading abstract painters.-Life:...
,
Ian StephensonIan Stephenson was an English abstract artist. Stephenson trained at King's College, Durham along with Noel Forster and had his first solo show in London at the New Vision Centre in 1958...
,
Patrick CaulfieldPatrick Joseph Caulfield, CBE, RA was an English painter and printmaker known for his bold canvases, which often incorporated elements of Photorealism within a pared down scene.-Life and work:...
and R.B. Kitaj were included in an exhibition entitled
The Independent Eye: Contemporary British Art From the Collection of Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie, at the
Yale Center for British ArtThe Yale Center for British Art is an art museum in New Haven, Connecticut at Yale University which houses the most comprehensive collection of British Art outside the United Kingdom...
.
Walker has a 2008 Landscape Painting on display at the
National GalleryThe National Gallery of Art and its Sculpture Garden is a national art museum, located on the National Mall between 3rd and 9th Streets at Constitution Avenue NW, in Washington, DC...
in
Washington, D.C.Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
in the Modern Section. He also has work in the following public collections:
Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney Australia; The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Arts Council, England; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, England; The British Museum, London, England; City Art Gallery, Leeds Museums and Galleries, England; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Imperial War Museum, London, England; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; Iziko Museum of Cape Town, South Africa; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York; The Fred Jones, Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, England; MIT-List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Museum am Ostwall, Dortmund, Germany; Museum Neuhaus—Sammlung Liaunig, Austria; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York; The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; Portland Museum of Art, Maine; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art Gallery, Edinburgh; Southampton City Art Gallery, England; Tate Gallery, London, England; Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland; The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, England; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut.
In 2010, Walker had a solo exhibition at Tsinghua University in Beijing, images can be viewed at: http://art.china.cn/zixun/2010-03/08/content_3407730.htm
External links
- COLOR IMAGE of John Walker's "Untitled", 1976 (acrylic, chalk, and canvas
Canvas is an extremely heavy-duty plain-woven fabric used for making sails, tents, marquees, backpacks, and other items for which sturdiness is required. It is also popularly used by artists as a painting surface, typically stretched across a wooden frame...
collageA collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
on canvas, 120 x 96 in.; Phillips CollectionThe Phillips Collection is an art museum founded by Duncan Phillips in 1921 as the Phillips Memorial Gallery located in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Phillips was the grandson of James H...
, Washington, DC)