Douglas Walker
"Douglas Walker" by Corinna Ghaznavi, Fall 2009, p. 166
The magic of Douglas Walker’s paintings lies in their stunning resemblance to blue-and-white Delftware, their surface effects and, of course, the force of their imagery. Over the years, Walker has developed unique techniques that include building his own easels and modifying or making his own brushes. He is also innovative in the final handling of his surfaces: paint might be applied lightly or gesturally, or dabbed, wiped or sprayed. Sometimes the surfaces of his panels appear aged and cracked, or approximate the texture of paper, copper or leather.
His images are both familiar and strange, beautiful and eerie. In one painting, a monu- mental yet ornately wrought building stands alone in a landscape. Its verticality emphasizes its steely solidity, but on closer examination, the structure proves in fact to be organic: the building is a form of vegetation. This unexpected movement from the recognizable to the strange leads one to enter into a world of fantasy that is perpetuated in painting after painting.
There are various architectural forms— delicate tall structures and blocky ones reminiscent of office towers—as well as industrial landscapes in which what look like hydro poles are topped by fluffy white dripping forms and barbs that appear to have taken on a science- fiction life of their own. The show also includes a series of abstracts: ornate, coiled, twisting and turning forms that emerge from and recede into blue backgrounds and appear variously to be perhaps jewels, feathers, fronds, baroque flourishes, even a strand of DNA.
The associations that one makes with these paintings range from the more obvious formal ones—Delft pottery and art-historical landscape painting—to science fiction, physics, alchemy and even Albrecht Dürer (Walker numbers and codes each painting and sometimes his “A”s are like the Renaissance painter’s). Of special note in this exhibition is the inclusion of two large-scale “folded” works on paper from 2001 that show dark, tropical, prehistoric landscapes. They are a reminder of the artist’s history of experimentation, which dates back to cliché-verre photographs he created in the 1980s. In imagery, format, technique and effects, he has been exploring ever since.
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