{"id":1619,"date":"2019-03-27T09:22:52","date_gmt":"2019-03-27T09:22:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/?p=1619"},"modified":"2019-03-27T09:23:42","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T09:23:42","slug":"eye-opener-james-faure-walker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/instantloveland.com\/wp\/2019\/03\/27\/eye-opener-james-faure-walker\/","title":{"rendered":"Eye Opener: James Faure Walker"},"content":{"rendered":"

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In the second instalment of our new feature, it’s the turn of British artist and critic James Faure Walker to describe the art and artefacts, from the ancient to the contemporary, that have helped shape his painting and his thinking.<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Early…<\/strong><\/p>\n

The first paintings that I really looked at were reproductions in Oliver Warner\u2019s \u2018British Marine Painting\u2019<\/em>. I copied them using a Rowney’s oil painting set. I was about ten years old. My brother had won the book as an art prize. For a while it was all storms and seascapes. I imitated a French postcard artist called Yvon, waves foaming over rocks, done with a wild palette-knife. Turner\u2019s 1805 \u2018Shipwreck\u2019<\/em> in the Tate brings it all back. Wonderful.<\/p>\n

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Joseph Mallord William Turner, \u2018The Shipwreck\u2019 (1805), oil on canvas, 170.5 x 241.6 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

Surprises happen when travelling. As a student at St Martins I hitch-hiked to Florence. In the Brancacci chapel it wasn\u2019t the Masaccio ‘Tribute Money’<\/em> that stuck in my mind, but the fresco opposite: Filippino Lippi\u2019s ‘Crucifixion of St Peter’<\/em>. Three figures are framed by an arch, witnessing the execution. One is turned towards you (probably, I now realize, a portrait of Botticelli). He makes eye contact. It makes you complicit.<\/p>\n

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Filippino Lippi, \u2018The Crucifixion of Saint Peter and the Dispute with Simon Magus\u2019 (c 1481-85), fresco, 230 x 598 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

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Detail<\/p><\/div>\n

Panofsky\u2019s \u2018Early Netherlandish Painting\u2019<\/em> introduced me to those peculiar interiors loaded with iconography. I think of carpentry, perhaps because of Joseph on the right of\u00a0 Robert Campin’s\u00a0‘Merode Altarpiece’<\/em> in the Cloisters, New York. There is timber too in Rogier van der Weyden\u2019s ‘Deposition’<\/em> in the Prado, a Picasso favourite, and up there with ‘Las Meninas’<\/em>, and ‘Les Femmes d\u2019Alger’<\/em>. Decades later, I was in Germany a few times, and discovered the Cologne School, especially Stephan Lochner. ‘The Martyrdom of the Saints’<\/em> is exquisite – sugary and gruesome.<\/p>\n

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Workshop of Robert Campin, \u2018Annunciation Triptych (Merode Altarpiece)\u2019 (ca. 1427\u201332) oil on oak, 64.5 x 117.8 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

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Rogier van der Weyden, \u2018The Deposition\u2019 (ca.1443) oil on panel, 204 x 261 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

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Stephan Lochner, \u2018The Martyrdom of the Apostles (The St Lawrence Altarpiece)\u2019 (ca.1435), tempera and oil on walnut, 120 x 180 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

At St Martins I had to give a seminar on the de Kooning show at the Tate in 1968. I knew little about Abstract Expressionism beyond the clich\u00e9s. At the time the breezy cool of Ken Noland\u2019s horizontal stripes, and Tony Caro\u2019s ‘Prairie’<\/em> at the Kasmin Gallery, made everything else look fussy and nostalgic. I wasn\u2019t prepared for de Kooning\u2019s slippery shapes, the muscular brushwork, the sheer energy of \u2018Excavation\u2019<\/em> or \u2018Easter Monday\u2019<\/em>. Shortly after this I worked as Sol Le Witt\u2019s draughtsman at the ICA, in one of the first conceptual shows, \u2018When Attitudes Become Form\u2019<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Willem de Kooning, \u2018Excavation\u2019 (1950), oil on canvas, 205.7 \u00d7 254.6 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

There was an exhibition of Chinese ceramics at the V&A in 1971 that started me off, particularly the Kangxi period. I was at the RCA and haunted the Chinese galleries. Later, I kept returning to the Greek vase section in the British Museum. I like to work out how they were done \u2013 the compass point in the shields in Exekias\u2019 vases. Then there are Iznik ceramics\u2026<\/p>\n

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Jingdezhen (made), (1662-1722), porcelain painted in underglaze blue and overglaze polychrome enamels<\/p><\/div>\n

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1980\u2019s…<\/strong><\/p>\n

Fast forward to 1980 and the Clyfford Still exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In Britain there were just one or two Stills. Rothko and Newman were all about the sublime, spoken of in hushed tones. I had a good friend, the painter Jim Adley, who got to know Still at the University of Pennsylvania1<\/a><\/sup>James Adley obituary guardian: https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/artanddesign\/2015\/apr\/21\/jim-adley-obituary<\/span>. I had also interviewed Al Held, whose fabulous black and white paintings of the 1970s, shown at Annely Juda, should be on this list2<\/a><\/sup>http:\/\/alheldfoundation.org\/artwork\/black-and-white-late\/6\/<\/span>. Held had been close to Still, so I knew some background. Held had put up a sign in his studio: \u2018who\u2019s afraid of cubism?\u2019<\/em> If I said something too respectful of the mythology around Abstract Expressionism Held would point at me and say, \u2018you\u2019ve been had!\u2019<\/em> I learned from Irving Sandler to trust what I saw for myself, to look really hard. (Irving\u2019s nickname, I believe, was \u2018Iron Eyes\u2019<\/em>.) So, the Met retrospective was something of a confrontation – shrieking colour clashes, lemons and pinks in impasto, a feathery touch in the late works. The paintings were forceful, strained, but defiant and alive. They were more interrupted than composed \u2013 odd, contrary, unresolved. In the recent Abstract Expressionist exhibition at the RA I noticed that Still had first outlined the jagged contours in charcoal. I never could get their measure. Sometimes the paintings looked nothing special, just austerely bombastic. Sometimes they were mighty and beautiful. But they were free, independent, and stood apart. They made other works look ingratiating, aesthetically perfumed, overworked, over-explained.<\/p>\n

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Clyfford Still, \u2018August 14 1978, (PH-1085)\u2019 (1978), oil on canvas, 289.6 x 233.7 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

Through John Hoyland, several of us at Artscribe3<\/a><\/sup>https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Artscribe<\/span> got to know Jackson Pollock\u2019s elder brother, Charles4<\/a><\/sup>Terence Maloon, 2002, Charles Pollock, Sweet Reason, Ball State University Museum of Art<\/span>. I went round the Pollock exhibition at the Pompidou in the 1980\u2019s with him \u2013 quite a privilege – and again when I tried to be clever, Charles, who was a gentle and quiet painter, said, \u2018Jim, the thing you have to understand is that Jack was a perfectionist\u2019<\/em>. Such a simple remark\u2026and it came from the person who had taught Jackson to paint.<\/p>\n

Two discoveries \u2013 which had nothing to do with art \u2013 changed my whole outlook. In 1983 I was an artist-in-residence in Melbourne (alongside John Bellany), and I undertook a lecture tour. My ambition was to get to the Great Barrier Reef. I stayed on Heron Island. I was just snorkelling, but I was overwhelmed by this living kaleidoscope: parrot fish nibbling at the coral, flashes of silver as vast shoals switched about, huge clams, the optical tricks of camouflage, the threat of moray eels, reef sharks, and manta rays. It wasn\u2019t the soft green landscape of the home counties. The ecology was awesome. Back home I set about making sense of this, and that meant a rethink, and painting with fewer distractions. After eight years it was time to cut loose from editing an art magazine.<\/p>\n

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James Faure Walker, \u2018Heron Island\u2019 (1984), oil on canvas, 170 x 305 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

The other discovery was computer graphics. I was primed for this because of the fluorescent colour-scape of the reef. Before the internet, Macs, mobiles, laptops, Photoshop and so on, you could only access \u2018high end\u2019<\/em> systems – Quantel, Getris, Matisse<\/em> – in labs or at trade shows. The hardware was way beyond the budget of an independent artist. At the shows huge screens flickered with the palest greens and purples. Tantalizing shapes were transformed in \u2018real time\u2019<\/em>– even photos! This was a revelation. The implications for a painter \u2013 for a Klee or Kandinsky – were boundless5<\/a><\/sup>http:\/\/www.vam.ac.uk\/content\/articles\/a\/computer-art-history\/<\/span>. Till then I had only worked on the crude Apple II<\/em> and Amiga<\/em>. Here was speed and power. Today none of that would make you blink. We take it for granted, as if it had always been available.<\/p>\n

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James Faure Walker, \u2018Dark Filament\u2019 (2006), archival Epson inkjet, 102 x 127 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

By and large the painting community did not take any interest: \u2018computer\u2019, \u2018graphics\u2019, \u2018design\u2019<\/em>, these were bogey words. It was dismissed as novelty art \u2013 sometimes with justification, it has to be said. The committed painter preferred the primitive physicality of \u2018real\u2019<\/em> paint, along with the aura of art history. I wrote a few enthusiastic articles, and had a regular column in CGI<\/em>, a computer graphics journal. In 2006, my book, \u2018Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer\u2019<\/em> 6<\/a><\/sup>Faure Walker, J., ‘Painting the Digital River: How an Artist Learned to Love the Computer’, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 2006.<\/span>was published in the USA. One reproduction I used was Gossaert\u2019s ‘Adoration’<\/em> from the National Gallery, making the point that Renaissance artists were quite capable of producing the flashy rendering of a 3D computer demo. They wouldn’t have been too bothered about the smooth impersonal surface. Or was I wrong?<\/p>\n

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Jan Gossaert, \u2018The Adoration of the Kings\u2019 (1510), oil on oak panel, 177 x 162 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

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Abstraction…<\/strong><\/p>\n

What of abstraction? I confess I use images to solve problems all the time, (except in watercolour, for some reason). After more than thirty years of working with physical and digital paint in parallel there simply is little point in having no-go areas. Here is a list of shows that have won me over by their sheer inventiveness and joy: Sigmar Polke (drawing show at MOMA), T\u00e0pies (print show in Falmouth), Dubuffet (Pompidou), Neo Rauch, Tal R, Hockney, Bernard Cohen, Patrick Heron, John Hoyland, Rose Wylie, Jules de Balincourt (the early paintings), Peter Doig, Vik Muniz (retrospective in New Orleans), Craig-Martin (Serpentine). I don\u2019t recall \u2018abstraction\u2019<\/em> coming up as a question.<\/p>\n

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Neo Rauch, \u2018Unschuld\u2019 (2001), oil on paper, 298 x 200 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

There was a Sam Francis print at Bernard Jacobson\u2019s a few years back. I really wanted to own it, but took photos instead, especially the details.\u00a0 I \u2018borrowed\u2019<\/em> these for a painting called \u2018Marsh Harrier\u2019<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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Sam Francis, \u2018Senza Titolo III\u2019 (1988), etching and aquatint, 49 x 53 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

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James Faure Walker, \u2018Marsh Harrier\u2019 (2016), oil on canvas, 137 x 173 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

When you transcribe a painting, or make a quick sketch in a museum, you unravel its secrets. I saw the Miro show last year in Paris. I love the way the images are found in the dance of the line: the looping calligraphy ropes in weird personages while spelling out the title: \u2018Escargot, Femme, Fleur, \u00c9toile\u2019<\/em>. It\u2019s all discovered in the making.<\/p>\n

Hang on. I haven’t mentioned the Braque \u2018Pink Tablecloth\u2019<\/em> in the Thyssen in Madrid\u2026.<\/p>\n

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Georges Braque, \u2018The Pink Tablecloth\u2019 (1938), oil and sand on canvas,\u00a087.5 x 106 cm<\/p><\/div>\n

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www.jamesfaurewalker.com<\/p>\n

James Faure Walker will be showing recent paintings at Felix and Spear, 18 May – 15 June<\/em><\/p>\n

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