There’s no news hook for this story, no upcoming exhibition or recently awarded prize to hang the post on. Visual artist Doug Walker came to my attention this summer while touring the home of a prominent Toronto collector who owns about 15 Walker works. The painting that stopped me in my tracks — Untitled No. 954, above — was hanging over the patron’s fireplace. I was riveted by the colour and composition but even more amazed by the extraordinary brushwork, which I’ve magnified, above right, in order to convey a sense of what makes Walker’s work so special.
Doug was one of five Canadians featured in a group show this past summer at Denver’s Plus Gallery. Denver Post critic Kyle MacMillan called Walker’s expansive No. A-601, left, the show’s “single most compelling work”. Little wonder since the piece measures 13′ x 8.5′ and took up nearly an entire wall. The scale of the painting is a sign of what’s to come; Walker is currently focused on “bigging things up” for a show at Oshawa’s Robert McLaughlin Gallery next year where the artist intends to fill a 14′ x 76′ wall with a single piece.
Walker, above, has been working in blue since 2005, just the one colour plus the white of the paper or canvas. Blue and white is one of the art world’s oldest colour combinations and harkens back to Dutch Delftware and Chinese export porcelain.
The artist confirms that ceramics are part of his inspiration: “I like the way images are handled in ceramics because you really can’t work a whole lot of detail into glazes, they tend to flow a little bit.”
Walker works in oils but dilutes the paint with an array of thinners depending on the effect he wants to achieve. He maintains a precise paint journal, below, detailing each “recipe” and brush technique so that he can recreate it again down the road if necessary.
In fact, when I ask Walker about his influences he cites J.M.W. Turner and more surprisingly, “mall painter” Bob Ross, whose assembly line techniques are explained in a range of “Joy of Painting” books. Many artists would be too embarrassed to acknowledge a debt to the déclassé Ross, but not Walker.
“When the Turner, Whistler and Monet show was at the AGO in 2004, I went all the time — I’m a member so I’d go about an hour before the gallery closed and just focus on one painting at a time getting up really close and trying to read the brushwork and figure out exactly how he was able to capture light the way he did.”
“After really examining Turner’s canvases I realized that he was doing some of the same things that Bob Ross does only with 1,000 times more skill. The idea is that if you want such and such an effect, you achieve it by doing this and this in a prescribed manner. They both developed a system, one is very low end, one was very high end but the systems are similar. When I started working with blue and white I was embarking on a similar exploration.”
“One of my goals as a painter,” he concludes, “is to conjure up an interior landscape and I wanted a shorthand way of getting that onto the canvas or the paper. I’m trying to plumb my own experience, to skim off the stuff that rises to the surface. The work has to happen quickly in order to allow that to take place because if you have to sit down and work at something then your conscious mind takes over. But if you can get things down with a single brush stroke then the work can happen quickly enough that you can keep the connection with the unconscious process.”
Walker’s subject matter runs the gamut from decorative motifs like the acanthus leaf to architecture, portraiture, landscapes and abstraction; for me some of his work summons Mervyn Peake’s dark, fantastical Gormenghast Trilogy.
Each work is numbered rather than named and those numbers appear in each work, cross referenced in Walker’s recipe catalogue: “I like the combination of text and image,” he says. “When I was a kid one of the things that inspired me to become an artist was vinyl album covers, the size was great and they always combined text and image. I never think of paintings as being finished; everything is a study, I make one then move on to the next one, I like to keep things moving along.”
Walker is not at all precious about his “studies.” Some of them are actually stapled to his studio wall, others sport holes in the paper where he’s sanded the image in an effort to merge it with the surface. He wants the viewer to see his brushwork but not the texture of the strokes.
Finally, I’m curious to know what Walker calls his preferred shade of blue. Is it Cobalt, Indigo, Saphire or Lapis blue? “It’s ultramarine with a bit of black added to it,” shares the artist.
After five years of working almost exclusively with the same colour, I think it’s fair to call it Doug Walker Blue. Take that Yves Klein.
Doug Walker is represented in Toronto by Nicholas Metivier Gallery above.
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