John Walker: 'New Paintings' At Ikon, Birmingham

John Walker, 'Still Life I', Oil on Canvas, 2018

I was over in Birmingham recently, visiting my friend Andrew Smith, and found myself at Ikon, reacquainting myself with the paintings of John Walker, after nearly four decades.

Birmingham-born Walker seemed to have garnered quite a lot of favourable attention, around the time I was studying Fine Art, in the early 1980s.  And yet, as an abstract painter -  and one whose work was largely landscape-derived, it also felt like artistic fashion was fast leaving him behind.  Behind his roughly scumbled brushwork and clotted surfaces, and despite the suggestion of recessive or theatrical illusionistic space, in his work - the fact remained that Walker was rooted in the essential language of formal abstraction.  In 1982, when I was hesitantly moving in a similar direction, that could often feel like the increasingly obsolete language of a previous generation.

John Walker, 'Recent Paintings', January 2020

John Walker, (R) 'Passage', 2015 & (L) 'Ripple', 2017, Oil On Canvas

John Walker, (R) 'Nomad II', 2018 & (L) 'Looking In', 2017, Oil On Canvas 

A year earlier, Norman Rosenthal's massive 'A New Spirit In Painting' survey at The Royal Academy had laid down a pretty unmissable marker.  It covered a wide gamut of styles, and included not a few established names.  However, the message was still pretty clear: if painting was to contradict the 'painting is dead' brigade, in a world where photography and Conceptualism had apparently claimed the future - it wouldn't be by extending the legacy of Modernist abstraction, apparently.  I remember trudging round the Academy, wanting to be pleased by the sheer quantity of painting on offer, and yet simultaneously perplexed that there was so little of kind of stuff I had begun to identify with.  Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Delaunay, and assorted Cubists and colour-field painters, were my newly-found heroes -  but now, no one else seemed particularly interested in them.  Expressionism was definitely a thing, but it was the figurative, German kind - not the American abstract variety.  The figure definitely trumped landscape, where subject or sources were concerned.

John Walker, 'St John's Bay Red, Yellow, Blue', Oil On Canvas, 2011-18 (Detail Below)

Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, it's now possible to see how I was there, just as painting had taken an official right-turn into what became labelled Post Modernism.  At the age of 19, however, I rather lacked the perspective to appreciate that - taking it all rather too personally, instead - I fear.   When I discovered Walker, in the library of Bristol Polytechnic's Arts Campus, shortly afterwards, I was pleased to find a contemporary abstractionist of the kind I wanted to affirm, but equally disappointed to note he was already resorting to depicting skulls alongside his trademark folded planes.  They felt like corny shorthand for some synthetic, non-specific angst - and like he was suddenly trying to play catch-up, with a spot of fashionable cartoon voodoo.   And that was pretty much the last time I thought much about him - until I walked into Ikon, with Andrew, 38 years later.  

John Walker, 'Fishing With Tom And Les', Oil On Canvas, 2017

John Walker, 'Lowe Lode', Oil On Canvas, 2019

Well, the good news is, the skulls are gone (although replaced by the occasional cut-out fish), the language is once more, resolutely abstract, and the overall context - clearly landscape derived.  Ironically, though, it's now me that has come to accept that the natural landscape (be it Cornish coastline, or American desert), isn't really my subject at all - and that painting in its pure sense, isn't even really my first language any more.  But, enough about me - this is supposed to be about John Walker's painting.  This deep into his career (and indeed - his life) there seems to be some vindication, in this late work, of the idea of sticking to one's guns, or at least reconnecting with one's original motivations.

John Walker, (R) 'John's Bay Pollution', 2017 & (L) 'Ripple', 2017, Oil On Canvas 

As for the paintings themselves, there's clearly no lack of confidence or assertion there.  Walker evokes his current adopted home environment, on the New England coast, with a vocabulary of crudely-daubed  angular waveforms, parallel bands, wonky chequerboard grids, truncated ellipses, and those occasional dangling fish motifs.  Although distinctly maritime, the palette is bold and direct, sometimes reverting to a monochrome (or something close-to) scheme of largely unmixed colour - often contrasting with clean whites, and with an impact that might be described as emblematic.  There's a distinct echo of Jasper Johns or even Frank Stella in all those repeating rhythms of lines and alternating stripes - although they're being employed here for far more imitative, and far less conceptual reasons, it should be recognised.

John Walker, 'Tidal Change', Oil On Canvas, 2017

John Walker, 'Place', Oil On Canvas, 2018

For, what Walker is actually doing, is to both distill and compile his landscape experience into a collision of separate glimpses and impressions.  This is the kind of simultaneity first devised by Cezanne, before being fully capitalised upon by Braque, Picasso, and the subsequent waves of Cubists, who followed them.  It also feels related in some way (albeit - with far less west coast shimmer, or refined elegance) to Diebenkorn's distillations of a coastal landscape.  Actually, a more apposite connection might be with a painter like Peter Lanyon, whose synthesis of the Cornish landscape famously came from swooping over it in gliders, and whose energetic, looping calligraphy and sweeping painterly gestures captured, within them, both time and motion.  Like Lanyon, Walker eschews the horizontal skyline (the portrait orientation of these canvases is no accident), and all those repeating stripes and zig-zags must surely chart the endless rhythm of waves, possibly observed on separate tides, and subject to varying marine temperaments. 

However, whilst Lanyon's best work appears to soar above his coast in a vortex of light, weather, and free movement, these paintings by Walker describe a far more rugged, and possibly constrained, situation.  The geometry may be wonky, but it's structural nonetheless - suggesting perhaps the funnelling of ocean tides between harbour walls, jetties or quaysides.  Walker may evoke the sea, but he appears to do so with his feet firmly on dry land.

John Walker, 'Nomad I', Oil On Canvas, 2018

Another feature which strikes me is his almost wilfully careless approach to paint application, along with the stark economy of much of this work.  In Lanyon, there is often a veiling of colours, or a kind of overwriting of marks, however rapidly they may have been laid down.  However, in many cases, Walker's marks appear to be the first and only thing he put down, before simply moving on to the next, equally slapdash statement.  In this situation, it's the accumulation, and the method in which those marks are all packed into the overall composition, which give the painting its sense of gravity.  In this respect, the paintings remind me of the way Patrick Heron's late garden paintings became comprised of hastily-sketched, and increasingly insubstantial, notations for the plants he wanted to describe - whereas he might have once immersed the viewer in lush fields of unbroken colour.

John Walker, 'Nomad II', Oil On Canvas, 2018

Is this something that happens to certain painters as they work on into old age - I wonder?  Does the urgency to still make paintings press up against the dwindling away of the time remaining in which to do so?  If I'm honest, the lack of tension in so many of Walker's marks, or concern over their perceived 'quality', disappointed me rather on first viewing.  First impressions can, of course be deceptive, but even now, I find these canvases far more pleasing when viewed across the room, or even - as here, in miniature reproduction.  In either case, a degree of internal tension returns as the image becomes more condensed upon the retina.  If his direct, unmodulated attack, represents a thoroughly courageous, and unselfconscious method of painting (as it certainly does), my own, rather more weaselly sensibilities are still drawn more towards those canvases upon  which a degree of layering, modulation, or visible over-painting has occurred.

John Walker, 'Stern View', 2017, Oil on Canvas

John Walker, 'Black Paint', Oil On Canvas, 2015 (Detail Below)

John Walker, 'John's Bay Pollution', Oil On Canvas, 2017 (Detail Below)

Perhaps then, John Walker is one of those artists with whose work I'm destined to always have a slightly strained relationship, (despite approving of it whole-heartedly, in principle).  Perhaps it's just a question of commitment.  Walker seemingly wields his brush with the minimum of hesitation or concern for the crippling niceties of painting.  He also pushed on through the vicissitudes of fashion, and inconvenient Art History, to pursue his core vision, regardless.  I, on the other hand, gave up even trying to be anything as noble or straightforward as a pure painter, some years ago.


John Walker: 'Recent Paintings', continues until 23 February, at Ikon, 1 Oozells Square, Birmingham, B1 2HS

'A New Spirit In Painting', ran from 15 January - 18 March 1981, at: The Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1S 3ET

'Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth' At Royal Academy Of Arts, London

Jasper Johns, 'Target', Encaustic & Collage On Canvas, 1961

Over the recent Half Term holidays, I went to view The Royal Academy’s current 'Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth' retrospective exhibition, along with my friends, Tim and Andrew.  It’s a show I’ve been anticipating all year.  Here are some of the things I learned:

• The early pieces with which Johns made such an impact, still feel strangely – almost hermetically, unassailable.  We’ve lived with copious reproductions of those targets, Stars & Stripes flags, US maps and numerals for over half a century, and yet the effect of the originals remains urgent and immediate.  And, despite such familiarity, the chances to see the real things, here in Europe - have been few and far between.  My initial reaction, on approaching these pieces for the first time, was a surprisingly emotional one of real joy.

Jasper Johns, 'Flag', Encaustic & Collage On Canvas, 1967

• There’s a crisp freshness about many of these pieces.  The target and flags that greet the visitor at the start of the exhibition show little of the aging or loss of vibrancy one might expect from paintings of their vintage.  Does the wax involved in Johns’ encaustic technique help to somehow fix the pigments – or were they just always particularly well cared-for as a result of their almost instant market value?

Jasper Johns, 'Map', Encaustic & Collage On Canvas, 1962 - 63

Jasper Johns, '0 Through 9', Charcoal & Pastel On Paper, 1961

• That initial celebratory rush gave way to a more reflective appreciation of just how much of an influence Johns’ characteristic aesthetic, and general demeanour have been on me over the years.  It emphasised the extent to which I have quoted him, both wittingly and unwittingly, on numerous occasions.  My ‘Vestige’ paintings from last year may - I now realise, be as much a subconcious paraphrasing of his ‘Canvas’, as they are a response to the actual street-based subject that triggered them.  My enthusiasm for a certain variety of battleship grey (Johns is a master of the greys), and deployment of text elements within my work - are as attributable to the influence of Johns as to that of any other artist possibly associated with them. 

Jasper Johns, 'Canvas', Encaustic & Collage On Canvas, 1956

• The established art historical significance of Johns’ breakthrough pieces is well rehearsed, and the passage of time has inevitably cemented them into the general canon of Modern Art.  It’s hard for us to fully appreciate now, the real disruptive effect their recourse to external ‘subject’ must have presented to the Abstract Expressionist certainties of mid-century New York painting.  Johns’ destruction of his very earliest work indicates his emergence wasn’t quite as fully formed and instantaneous as official history suggests, but does emphasise the degree to which it represented a significant step-change in everyone’s artistic priorities (including his own).  If Duchamp once pointed the way out of established European tropes, perhaps Johns (and Rauschenberg) did the same for American art.

• In fact, it actually feels like Johns’ agenda was often one of repurposing Duchamp’s pioneering promotion of the idea over the sensory appeal of the artifact - back in favour of the resonant art object.  There is a certain stripe of conservatism running through Johns, who remains, at his core - a maker of beautiful things.  He seems to epitomise my own trite personal mantra that Art is certainly a branch of Philosophy – but one in which you still get the joy of making stuff.

Jasper Johns, 'Fool's House', Oil, Sculpt-Metal & Charcoal On Canvas
With Objects, 1961-62

• Johns has naturally beautiful visual handwriting.  He is one of Art’s consistently elegant scribblers and possesses an enviable deftness with the nominally expressionistic brush stroke.

Jasper Johns, 'Periscope (Hart Crane)', Oil On Canvas, 1963

• For all that, his deployment of the gestural mark actually appears to serve a different purpose.  There’s a distancing effect in the early works, in which Johns appears to quote expressionism as a formal option, rather than an unconscious outpouring - and as a means to create nuance and a friction of new implications within his utilitarian, given subjects.  Put simply - to modulate and encrust formal elements that we expect to be functional signs, is to invest them with new layers of potential meaning.

• …And, I’ve always loved the pictorial tension between a loose, painterly fields and a crisp, precise edge – of which Johns is a consummate master.

Jasper Johns, 'The Critic Sees', Sculpt-Metal On Plaster With Glass, 1961

• Sculptures like ‘The Critic Sees’, or the ‘Painted Bronze’s, are among the most elegant jokes in Modern Art, and feel distinctly part of Duchamp’s legacy.

Jasper Johns, 'Painted Bronze', Oil On Bronze, 1961

Jasper Johns, 'Painted Bronze', Oil On Bronze, 1960

• If Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were once roped together, (even more intimately than Braque and Picasso, at another pivotal moment in western art), how fortunate are we to have been presented with major retrospectives of both artists in recent months?  The chance to compare and re-evaluate works so emblematic of their particular moment - and so freighted with significance, (and to mostly find them still vital and enduring in resonance) feels like a luxury.  This show hasn’t been without its detractors, but I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

• In the light of this, is it too obvious to observe the inconvenient (but oft-repeated) sense of a diminution of power in the later work of both artists?  Of course, these things never travel in an undeviatingly straight line, or as explicably as art critics and historians would wish.  Nevertheless, both retrospectives seem to suggest a certain dilution in the intensity of each artist’s powers or effect, as time went on.  Is this the price to be paid for such early acclaim? - or a debilitating function of the foaming art market? - or simply an assertion that almost no one can keep scaling the same lofty heights of eloquence they once did, whilst simultaneously avoiding the spiral into repetition and self-parody?

Jasper Johns, 'Spring', Encaustic On Canvas, 1986

• And this is, of course, the real dilemma with John’s career.  The prevailing theory that his work beyond the 1970s represents a notable fall-off in quality and purpose is commonly heard, but I was determined to seize the opportunity to make up my own mind.  The sad fact is, all three of us found more foundation in that view than we might have hoped for.  Regrettable though that may be, 'Something Resembling Truth' must surely trump any desire to airbrush an artist’s reputation.  Perhaps we should instead be grateful that an artist who seems almost too good to be true, early on, proved himself merely human after all.  And ultimately, I’d defend the right of any artist to struggle on for as long as they feel the need to – regardless of the outcomes.  The truth is, it’s probably less of a problem for Johns than it is for his audience and critics.

Jasper Johns, 'Racing Thoughts', Encaustic & Collage On Canvas, 1983

• For what it’s worth, my own ‘problem’ seems connected to John’s desire to replace his earlier, peerless demeanour of cool detachment, with one in which he admitted personal emotions and insights into the work.  But that’s hardly a crime per se.  Indeed, it still forms the main agenda of a huge proportion of artists.  And the impulse to collage more personal allusions, obscure signifiers and tangential references into an oeuvre where once elegant distillation or a tendency toward minimalist concentration once held sway, is a forgivable ambition.  It might even represent a degree of personal growth on Johns’ part.  The real issue is a seeming difficulty in realising his new agenda.  There’s a sense of an artist forcing the ideas more, at the same time as the ability (or energy) to resolve them is somehow diminished.

Jasper Johns, 'Montez Singing', Oil On Canvas, 1989-90

• What feels most disappointing is the transition in Johns’ work from sublime plasticity (be it painterly, sculptural, or in print), to a dispiritingly thin variety of illustration.  It seems ironic that his shift to more personal subjects, and emotional insights, should seem them merely described (often poorly), rather than evoked.  It’s a seeming reversal of his earlier state of sensual philosophy.  The use of supposed trompe-l’oeil effects, feels particularly shoddy (all those corny peeling corners and badly-rendered nails).  It could have been an interesting strategy, but actually ends up feeling lazy and lame.  The quotation of child-art eyes and lips is especially embarrassing (when it might have been a effective paraphrase).  A painting like ‘Montez Singing’ looks like a waste of a lunch break.  It’s all somewhat dispiriting, and I was surprised by how much anger it seemed to unleash within us.  Is that just an inevitable pit-fall of hero worship, I wonder?

• Of course, it could just be that John’s mark-making is better suited to the abstract that to the representational.  Could my adverse reaction be because that is how I feel about my own?

Jasper Johns, 'Between The Clock And The Bed', Oil On Canvas, 1981

Jasper Johns, 'Corpse And Mirror', Oil On Sand On Canvas, 1974 - 75

• Although it represents a transitional phase between ‘classic’ early Johns, and the more questionable later work, I still find much to like in his works from the 1970s and early 80s – in which all over patterns of hatching and flagstones take precedence over the more overtly emblematic motifs of previous years.  These new devices might appear to hark back to the painterly concerns of the Abstract Expressionists, but there’s still a sense of conscious deliberation about Johns’ new methods of getting across a canvas.  They feel like signifiers for certain Ab Ex. tropes, rather than an unmediated outpouring of emotion or spirituality, and despite their more obscure, personal origins are essentially just new elements of vocabulary within Johns’ own invented pictorial language.  There is a sense of layered meanings filtered through these broken fields; but they are mainly still references to external sources or quotations from other artists (such as Edvard Munch) – rather than any non-specific expressionism.

Jasper Johns, 'Dancers On A Plane, 'Oil On Canvas With Painted Bronze Frame', 1980

• Thankfully, not all the news from the latter portion of the exhibition is as bad.  The ‘Regrets’ series feels to me like a moderate return to at least some of Johns’ intrinsic strengths.  He selects a single, found motif in a photo of Lucian Freud, commissioned by Francis Bacon.  Instead of overburdening it with additional imagery, he allows its resonances to emerge through the layering and mirroring of this single source; for the negative shape created by the photo’s damaged portion to become a formal pictorial element of some significance; and for the ghostly skull which haunts the series to be found through pictorial chance operation - rather than tritely imposed.  Lest we forget, Johns moved in the same circles as John Cage, back in the day.

 

Jasper Johns, 'Regrets', Oil On Canvas, 2013

• Whilst the exhibition closes with a perfectly acceptable painting derived from the Freud image, the full implications of the ‘Regrets’ series really play out in a suite of printed variations on the theme.  Johns continues to quote himself (and others) in all this, but it feels like he’s digging a bit deeper again, and releasing things rather than merely forcing them.

Jasper Johns, 'Regrets (State 13)' Aquatint On Paper, 2013

• The underlying theme of ‘Regrets’ is a fairly standard one of ageing and impending demise -  underpinned by a distinct sense of existential despair.  But, surely that’s forgivable from an octogenarian artist – isn’t it?  Would that we might all be working as productively as Johns, at a similarly advanced age.

'Jasper Johns: Something Resembling Truth' runs until 10.12.17 at: Royal Academy Of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, W1S 3ET.

On Reflection: Marlene Dumas, Richard Diebenkorn & Frank Stella

Frank Stella, 'Inflated Star And Wooden Star', Polished & Patinated Aluminium And Teakwood,
2014, (Detail)

Back in May, I spent a day catching up with a couple of major exhibitions in London.  At the time, I was tied up in my own work, and with exhibition preparations, and just never found time to write a blog post about my trip.  In fact, I even felt a little guilty about taking a whole day away from my work at the time.  However, the two shows I attended were both significant retrospectives of work by two painters I rate very highly, namely Richard Diebenkorn and Marlene Dumas.  I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t make the effort.

Royal Academy Of Arts, London, May 2015

Marlene Dumas, 'Jule - The Woman', Oil On Canvas, 1985

It feels too late to revisit either show in detail here now.  Suffice it to say that, in the event, I didn’t regret sacrificing my time (or money) in either of them.  ‘Marlene Dumas: 'The Image As Burden’, at Tate Modern [1.] was a surprisingly badly hung, and somewhat uneven show, but was still full of terrific stuff.  It was a reminder that Dumas is often up there with the best, as regards pushing paint around or distilling a resonant image.  ‘Richard Diebenkorn’, at The Royal Academy [2.] was just a once-in-a-blue-moon chance to catch up for real with the work of an artist I’ve been consistently drawn to, - ever since I first encountered him in my Teens.

Richard Diebenkorn, 'Berkeley #57', Oil On Canvas, 1953

Diebenkorns almost never appear on this side of the Atlantic.  Indeed, for many years, he was a painter whose work I studied longingly, without actually having encountered any hanging on a wall.  I attended the Whitechapel Gallery’s 1991 retrospective with some trepidation therefore, and was delighted to find that the paintings were even more satisfying than any reproduction could have implied.  Since then, I had only seen two or three more during a visit to San Francisco in 2000.  Diebenkorn is, above all, a painter’s painter, and one who demands first-hand engagement, so I was hardly going to forego this second opportunity to see a representative cross-section of his oeuvre.  It proved a conviction that was justified all over again.  Who knows if I’ll ever get another chance in this country?

Anyway, instead of spending too much time discussing exhibitions that have been over for some time, here are some photographs of a work by another, even bigger name American artist, namely Frank Stella.  It detained me for a few minutes on my way into the R.A., making for some striking images in the process.  Stella is an artist whose early, monochrome works have always appealed to me, not least for their austere geometric minimalism, but whose subsequent output seemed sometimes to succumb to the twin demons of bombast or empty decoration.  Perhaps it was always going to be difficult to work out of such sublimely distilled starting point, without appearing to be just adding stuff for the sake of it [3.].

Frank Stella, 'Empress Of India', Metallic Powder & Emulsion On Canvas, 1965

Frank Stella, 'Inflated Star And Wooden Star', Polished & Patinated Aluminium And
Teakwood, 2014 

Judging by his large sculpture, ‘Inflated Star And Wooden Star’ dominating the R.A. forecourt when I visited, he seems to have arrived at the point, late in his career, of producing large, grandiose sculptural statements for public spaces.  I’ll confess to sometimes feeling pretty underwhelmed by this kind of thing, although one must always remember not to get distracted by sheer scale and to judge each piece on it’s individual merits.  For every mirrored, amorphous blob of Anish Kapoor’s somewhat vacuous, international style, there’s a monumental, rusted Serra that still gives me a physical thrill, or a bonkers Oldenberg Pop intervention that makes me smile.

My initial impression was that the Stella might belong in the first category, - even down to its use of high-visual impact, polished metal surfaces.  Despite my reservations, I was soon relishing, and photographing in close-up, the wonderful distorted surface reflections on the larger of its two star forms.  Of particular appeal were the quasi-psychedelic distortions of the R.A.’s Neo-Classical façade, (with all that implies), and the dramatic contrasts and vivid colour afforded by the sublime early summer sunshine.

Having grabbed a few choice shots, I gave ‘IS&WS’ little further thought and moved indoors to immerse myself in Diebenkorn’s far more limpid world, (one that is reflective in a completely different way).  Looking back at the images however, I wonder if I was a little too dismissive of Stella’s efforts.  It seems to me that, in two rather different star forms, he plays with the idea of something having considerable mass, weight and materiality, but simultaneously made of light and gas.  The heavy timber of his smaller star, is essentially just a space frame, - a delineation of a polygonal portion of air, whilst, for all its metallic solidity, its larger partner is purely about the light it reflects.  Each also demonstrates what are essentially just conventions for describing something supremely intangible.  Any star we depict or make, can only ever be a mental construct.

The more I think about it, the more this seems like an intelligent, even philosophical, way to comment on the true nature of stars.  They’re undeniably there, on an astronomical and yet unapproachable scale.  Paradoxically, there’s really no ‘there’ at all, - just a massive concentration of energy we can only interact with in terms of the impression it exerts at a distance.  Cosmic!

[1.]:  'Marlene Dumas: The Image As Burden', Tate Modern, London.  5 February - 10 May, 2015

[2.]:  'Richard Diebenkorn', Royal Academy Of Arts, London.  14 March - 7 June, 2015

[3.]:  Is this something that could be said to have also plagued Jasper Johns’ later output?  Is it better to start out a bit rough and ready and allow increasing refinement to arrive with the passing years?  Is it ever possible, or even desirable, to plan these things anyway?