"John Walker: Time and Tides".(art exhibition of landscape and war paintings)(Brief Article)

"John Walker: Time and Tides," at Knoedler & Company, New York. January 18-March 3, 2001

An English-born resident of Boston, John Walker paints on the littorals of abstraction, informed by its history and aims, but not willing to forsake the bedrock of representation and go fully into the non-objective sea. Of course, this aesthetic position has its own vaunted history, one primarily concerned, like Walker, with abstracting the landscape. To his landscapes, which hover with certainty between the purely abstract and expressionist representation, Walker brings a vigorous brush and a keen eye for the effects of changing light and weather on the Maine coast. But his new show, "Time and Tides," was divided into two parts: the landscapes and several large canvases that deal with World War I. Viewing it, I was reminded of the importance for an artist of seeing, of having the experience of direct observation.

Turbulent and suffused by haunting, heavily applied autumnal tones, the landscapes are all dominated by a filled-in figure-eight shape, or variations on it, glimmering on the water. In Fading Storm, Outgoing Tide (2000), the canvas divides into three broad sectors: a burst of orange-yellow oil interrupting the wide, horizontal brushstrokes of dark paint in the sky's notched rectangle; on the right side, the land occupies an upright and narrow rectangle, in which streaks of green, yellow, and white emerge from among a welter of blues, blacks, and browns; the figure-eight, itself divided lengthwise into brownish yellow and whitish portions, sits in the sea's wide, dark rectangle. Walker is an expressionist in the sense that, for him, emotion is conveyed by color and in eloquent, and rawly energetic, brushstrokes. For ...