Paintings aspire to ecstasy, but the revelations feel forced
When artist John Walker set up a studio in a former Odd Fellows Hall in the coastal Maine town of Walpole, he found a box of old beano cards there. Evidently the sort of painter who will paint on just about anything within arm's reach, Walker did not try to sell the cards on
Walker, 66, traveled a long way to find those beano cards. He grew up in England, lived in the United States in the 1970s, and for most of the '80s was in Australia. Then he returned to the United States and in 1993 took a teaching position at Boston University, where he is now director of the graduate painting program.
Throughout his career as a painter, Walker has stayed true to the ethos of Abstract Expressionism: a belief, that is, in the authenticity of spontaneous processes, feelings, and visions as against the artificial, spirit-crushing strictures of industrialized modernity. Whether painted outdoors or in the studio, his works exhibit an intuitive immediacy in the ways they are made and in what they're made of. Materials lately have included pine needles, moths, and clam-flat mud along with generous quantities of oil paint. But though they are made with considerable facility, the Seal Point pictures do little to refresh the Romantic cliche of the artist who escapes both the cerebral mind and the urbane sophistication of the city. Nor do they rejuvenate the hoary convention of painting on old found objects.
The paintings aspire to an ecstatic visual poetry. In most cases, spacious and luminous images of sea, sky, and land are discernible, and the representational imagery is amplified by emphatic contrasts of lights and darks, colors ranging from fiery orange to velvety deep blues and greens, and thick brush marks that writhe, squiggle, slash, and sweep as though imbued with instinctive lives of their own.
Near the center of many paintings, a rounded E-shape appears, a curious abstraction in the midst of so much hectically rendered topography. It is meant to represent a tidal pool, but it seems a mystical sign. Looking at these paintings is like seeing through the eyes of someone having a transcendentalist revelation.
If all this sounds a little forced, well, it is. Walker paints with a dexterous but heavy and monotonous hand, and he seems rather too infatuated with the showy effects of light and color he achieves. Considering how small they are, the paintings are remarkably unsubtle.
Then there's the beano card question. In many paintings, the gridded black lines, numbers, and words printed on the cards are still visible through the paint, and Walker is clearly responding to that underlying structure, as his compositions tend to a loosely gridded order. But there are other aspects of the cards that he does not seem particularly interested in.
Viewers may wonder, for example, if the painter means to draw a connection between art-making and game-playing. That could be interesting, but it seems that for Walker -- who probably does not have a Duchampian bone in his body -- the cards are only objects to paint on like old hardback book covers or cigar box lids.
More troublingly, the cards unintentionally give the project a modular look: For all the sensuous touch and quasi-visionary pyrotechnics, there is something mechanical about Walker's prolific and all-too-predictable productivity. It is too easy to see the Seal Point paintings more as tony commodities than as the inspiring expressions of Romantic urgency. Which is unfortunate, because the industrial erosion of nature and soul that Walker's paintings are designed to resist is not going to stop any time soon.
Ken Johnson can be reached at kejohnson@globe.com. 
