John Walker English, b. 1939

John Walker has led a resurgence of abstract painters who look to nature, emotion, and, especially, place

For Walker, air, land, and sky are interchangeable in their fluidity; the artist paints them as layered, floating and charged, oozing, dragged within and often falling off the gridded card. Occasionally, printed elements from the Beano cards emerge, ghost-like from beneath the paint layers — a minuscule roving elephant, perhaps, or, more frequently, the underlying grid, including the numbers and letters of the bingo game.

 

Walker is an unrepentant modernist who has led a resurgence — mostly through uncompromising example — of painters reinvigorating abstraction by looking to nature, ideas, emotion and, especially, place. The Seal Point paintings are the artist’s celebration of the tidal mud flats, wind-driven, irregular wave patterns, and the island-rimmed horizon hugging the upper edge of his canvases. It’s the view from his front door on Seal Point — arguably among the most visually arresting sights, fair weather and foul, along the entire Maine coast. Seal Point’s natural beauty borders on the sublime, initially intimidating Walker; it took ten years before he could paint what he saw.

 

As in the work of artists he most admires — Matisse, Hartley, Marin, even Rembrandt and Goya — Walker’s paintings don’t much look like their sources in the real world. Indeed, that is the point. They reference how a place feels more than how it looks, much like Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park paintings describe the Southern California streetscape, his Santa Monica neighborhood’s compartments and divisions, dissolving into pure, high color within loose but straight boundaries, occasionally disappearing or simply slipping into the shimmering expanse of oceanic blueness. It represents a way of thinking about structure and color and place that Walker seems to share and references according his own unique vision.

 

Chris Crosman for Hyperallergic