John a Walker Brochure

8/14/2019 John a Walker Brochure

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Published on the occasion of an exhibition held at

View Gallery from 22 April 3 June 2006

View Gallery

34 High Street

Thames Ditton

Surrey KT7 0RY

020 8972 9706

[email protected]

www.viewgallery.co.uk

oranges are the only fruit

new paintings by John A Walker

London: Institute of Artology, 2006

Orange: bisectedOil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005

Front cover

Orange: ripeOil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005


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Institute of Artology

Studio 1

C307

Chocolate Factory

Clarendon Road

Wood Green

London N22 6XJ

Email: [email protected]

ISBN 0-9545702-3-5

Rita Hatton and John A Walker

Unless otherwise stated all photographs are by Rob Petherick

Designed by

The Set Up

34 High Street

Thames Ditton

Surrey KT7 0RY

Email: [email protected]

The Orange Series I & II: An Interview between Rita Hatton and John A Walker

RH. From 1965 to 1975, you painted oranges. Why oranges?

JW. At Art College I ended up producing large red/green abstracts and fetishistic sculptures,

but after leaving in 1961 I felt dissatised by the lack of content and decided to return to

nature.(1) I turned to fruit as a simple token of nature. Of course, it is also a sign of human

culture because it is cultivated and a

commodity because sold in supermarkets.

At rst I painted apples but since they were soredolent of Czanne I switched to oranges.

The subtext of the paintings was the theme of

pictorial representation and the sort of games

with it Magritte used to play there was a

vogue for Magritte in the 1960s.

RH. Was the art education you received

irrelevant then?

JW. No, but it had been very puzzling because

it had involved exposure to so many disparate

sources, principles and inuences. For

instance, we were taught Basic Design, a

modern course which involved exploring line,

colour, structure and so forth separately.

However, there was no guidance as to how

they were to be brought together again. In one

1969 canvas I painted an orange three times in

terms of line, tone and colour within one

canvas but I left it up to viewers to bring the

three images together in their minds. We were

also taught historic academic disciplines such

Orange: colour, line and toneOil on canvas, 137 x 91 cm, Orange Series I, 1969

Collection Sophie Orman


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as life drawing and still life painting. The head of the Art College was a Euston Road gurative

painter, the Master of Painting tutor was an abstract artist while his main assistant was a Pop

artist. There was also the external inuence of American Abstract Expressionism. I must have

spent more than a decade after college trying to make sense of the art education I received.

RH. Some might say your choice of subject matter was very narrow.

JW. True, but if you study almost any object intensely enough it turns out to be very rich.

Oranges have so many different surface features and textures and can be placed in a variety of

relationships. You can show the outside and the inside and there are different brands andvarieties such as Valencia and blood oranges. Furthermore, oranges can evoke parts of the

human body; for instance, the navels of oranges resemble belly buttons or anuses. Printed

words too can appear on the skins of oranges such as the brand names Jaffa and Outspan, and

now one nds paper stickers advertising organisations like the Waitrose Foundation. Once I did

try to depict the harsh social realities I witnessed in Holloway, North London but then I saw a

television documentary about the same subject that depicted it far better than my painting

could. There are now so many cartoons, documentary photographs and newsreel lms depicting

politicians, wars, famines and so forth it is difcult to see what painting can add. I do not

preclude addressing social or political subjects in the future but I am troubled by the idea of

aesthetic pleasure being derived from, say, a painting of the aftermath of a suicide bombing.

At the moment it seems to me worthwhile to paint some afrmative images that will give people

visual pleasure and stimulate their taste buds.

RH. What other external inuences were there during the 1960s?

JW. In 1969, American astronauts landed on the Moon and images of its crater-pitted surface

lled TV screens. I could not travel to the surface of the Moon but I could travel to the surface of

an orange. In one painting I even included the kind of geometric grid that used to appear

superimposed on the Moon in scientic photographs. A large painting of an orange also

resembles the Sun. Another subliminal inuence was the mandala image popular in the hippie

culture of the period. Although I was not a hippie and not religious, I knew Ajit Mookerjees 1967

book on Tantra art and saw the Hayward exhibition in 1971 about Tantra. The mandala with its

centre-circumference dialectic was a symbol of wholeness, unity and integration. The circle too

in Christian iconography is the monogram of God a symbol of eternity and perfection. Looking

back, I wonder if I was attracted to the circle or sphere by a psychological need to hold a

conicted personality together.

RH. Would you comment on some of the formal characteristics of the paintings?

JW. Painting is a still or static medium; consequently, it best suits still lives of objects such as

fruits. Of course, there is a long history of still life painting and botanical illustrations of plants

and fruit. Painting is also a at medium; hence, three-dimensional objects are a contradictionand have to be attened unless one is after illusionism. Paintings are conventionally square or

rectangular in format; consequently, round objects have also to be adjusted to t the shape of

support. For one recent painting I peeled an orange and laid the peel at in order to conform to

the atness of the canvas. The peel ended up resembling the map of an island. Fortuitously, the

peel had a Waitrose Foundation sticker on it featuring a map of Africa, so the painting turned out

to be a kind of pun.

RH. It sounds as though you are following the dictums of the American critic Clement Greenberg

in his famous 1961 essay Modernist Painting.

JW. Although I have attacked in print the inuence of Greenbergs formalism, there are some

things he said that I as a painter agree with. I think painting must play to its strengths if it is

to compete against and differentiate itself other visual media.

RH. What about scale? Many of your images of oranges are large.

JW. Yes, enlargement is another tactic employed to generate elds of colour parallel to the

picture plane. It also reects, I suppose, the inuence of close-ups of food in advertising

photographs.


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RH. The intense colours of your second series of orange paintings impress most people

who see them.

JW. As a young painter, I was strongly inuenced by van Gogh and sought a comparable intensity

of colours and colour contrasts. However, much of the credit for the vivid hues of the recent

paintings must go to t he British pigment manufacturer Michael Harding. His artists oil colours

are expensive but brilliant. Colour intensity is one characteristic of oil painting that is superior

to rival media such as television, photography, etc; also, of course, brushwork and the surface

textures of hand-made pictures differentiate them from images that appear on screens.

Todays mass media are very powerful but t here are still things painting can do that they cant.

RH. In one small picture, dated 1965, there is an orange enclosed in quotation marks.

What was the reason for that?

JW. It derived from my interest in the language of representation. I was playing around with

the idea of combining pictorial and linguistic elements. After all, most paintings have titles and

so one could argue they are mixed-media.

Later, theorists argued that post-modernism

involved placing everything in quotation

marks; consequently, I think I can claim to

have unconsciously invented it or at least

anticipated it! Another small work on paper

featured a drawing and a photograph of an

orange, a sample of the pigment orange,and a collaged map showing the town of

Orange in Southern France. This work

demonstrated the polysemic character

of language the multiple meanings and

references of the word orange.

RH. Some of the paintings seem quite sensuous, erotic even.

JW. I hope so. One painting was a close up of a pile of oranges so that it constituted a landscape

of rounded forms and warm colour for the eye to penetrate. Some views of oranges resemble

female breasts and I recall painting a diptych showing two oranges side by side one ripe and

one rotten entitled The good and the bad breast. This was a reference to the theories of the

psychoanalyst Melanie Klein that I read at the time. Appropriately, a doctor bought the painting.

RH. Why did you cease making paintings of oranges?

JW. My work evolved towards a philosophical reection on the character of colour, using thehue orange as an example.(2) And then in other directions such as political photomontage.(3)

During the 1970s, employment as an art critic and art historian also left little time for painting.

RH. However, you have now resumed the orange series?

JW. Yes, since I retired from lecturing I have the time and there seem more ideas and themes

to explore. For instance, I have become fascinated by the iconography of popular imagery

postcards and the like emanating from the land of oranges (Florida and California in

particular), which depict orange groves alongside streamliner trains, orange blossom pageant

queens, and so on in a utopian manner.(4) In addition, there now seems to be demand for the

paintings, which was lacking in the 1960s and 1970s.

RH. The painting Orange blossom Queen 1948 with its four juxtaposed images reminds me

of James Rosenquists Pop art from the 1960s.

JW. Obviously I am familiar with the Rosenquists work and I agree that painting does recall his.

However, there was no conscious inuence. So much imagery has been produced over

the centuries it is virtually impossible to create new images that do not i n some way resemble

earlier ones. I decided not to worry about it and I also think early Pop art merits a revival.

OrangeOil on hardboard, 25.3 x 34.3 cm, 1965. Orange Series I

Collection John Stezaker, London. Photo: John A Walker


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RH. Your painting of a sun-kissed eve from the land of oranges was inspired by postcard imagery

of California. It seems rather kitsch and does it not depict a mythical realm?

JW. Yes. Sometimes a painting seems to dictate the direction it takes despite ones initial

intentions. I was surprised and taken aback by it but decided not to censor myself by destroying

it. The image is mythical in character but I feel that, unlike the Biblical Garden of Eden, it has

a grounding in truth California is a land of sunshine, it is a rich, fertile state with a substantial

citrus industry and oranges and orange juice are reputably healthy products; Hollywood too

is a source of suntanned female esh. Another painting consisting of four images of orange

picking was also based on postcards. In this instance, two images of female beauties with

baskets picking oranges were juxtaposed against t wo images of male labourers picking oranges

from ladders. Both kinds of postcard were sold to visitors to California but my aim was to

contrast a touristic conception, on the one hand, with the reality of large-scale orange

harvesting on the other. Juxtaposing images in this way harks back to the 1970s when I and

others in London were reading theorists like Roland Barthes and John Berger, undertaking

critiques of mass culture images and making montages from them.

John A Walker (b. 1938, Lincolnshire) was trained as a painter in a University art department

in Newcastle upon Tyne from 1956 to 1961. In 1958, he won rst prize in a painting competition

organised by Tyne Tees Television (the judge was Lawrence Gowing). On graduation he moved

to London and worked in the Civil Service, public and art libraries, and for many years wrote art

criticism for a range of art magazines and taught art history in a number of British art schools.

Before he retired in 1999, he was Reader in Art and Design History at Middlesex University.

He has written 15 books and over 100 periodical articles about Van Gogh, John Latham, the ne

arts and mass media, and visual representations of reghters. In 2005 he resumed painting

after a gap of two decades.

1 John A Walker has described his art school education in a pamphlet entitled: Learning to Paint: A British Art Student

and Art School 1956-61, (London: Institute of Artology, 2003).

2 See John A Walkers pamphlet: A Few Semiotic Paintings of 1975, Unknown and Destroyed, (London: Institute of

Artology, 2002).

3 For a history, see John A Walkers book: Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain, (London & New York: I.B. Tauris, 2000).

4 See, for instance, the illustrations in Brian and Richard Weavers book The Citrus Industry in the Sunshine State,

(Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 1999), The Postcard History Series. Colour postcards are also sold via the ebayauction website and larger images via poster websites.

SOLO EXHIBITIONS:

Univision Gallery, Newcastle upon Tyne, 1958;

The Gallery, London, 1975;

View Gallery, Thames Ditton, April-June 2006

GROUP EXHIBITIONS:

Lincolnshire Art Association Annual exhibition 1956;

Young Contemporaries 1958, 1959, 1960;

London Group show 1965;

Small Paintings exhibition, Wills Lane Gallery, St Ives & Bulls Eye Gallery, Licheld, 1972;

Art & Society, Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1976;

Farnham Maltings Show, 1976;

Death Show, Kettles Yard, Cambridge, Dec 1987;

Eat art exhibition The Robert Phillips Gallery, Walton on Thames, November 2005

EXHIBITIONS ORGANISED:

Van Gogh in Provence (Book & photo display) Camden Public Library, 1970;

Rosa Luxemburg & Karl Liebknecht, Pentonville Gallery, London, 1986

COLLECTIONS:

Works in the collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London,

Wolverhampton Art Gallery and several private collections.

For more biographical details, see the website: www.artology.info

Rita Hatton studied the history of art at Middlesex University. She is a director of the Institute

of Artology and joint author of the bookSupercollector: A Critique of Charles Saatchi, (London:

Institute of Artology, 3rd edition 2005); she is also a painter, mother and business executive.


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Heavy orangeOil on canvas, 10 x 14 cm, Orange Series II, 2005

Orange: sectionOil on canvas, 127 x 101 cm, Orange Series II, 2005


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Orange: node IIOil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005

Orange: navel IIOil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005


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Orange: conguration upper leftOil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005

Orange: large nodeOil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005


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Orange mountain against grey backgroundOil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005

ValenciaOil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005


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Sun-kissed Eve from the land of oranges with super-chief streamlinerOil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005

Orange blossom Queen 1948Oil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005


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Orange: peelOil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005

Orange: two or one?Oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm, Orange Series II, 2005


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Miracle brandOil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005

Orange picking (from American postcards)Oil on canvas, 130 x 130 cm, Orange Series II, 2005


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Mandarin segmentsOil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, Orange Series II, 2006

Orange slicesOil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm, Orange Series II, 2006


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brochuredesign:www.t

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John A Walker in Esher, Surrey in January 2006 with

Orange: node 2005 (left) and Orange: navel 2005 (right)

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John a Walker Brochure