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Artist Statement for Walter King
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In a way I'm starting over...
I wanted to make images. I liked making figures, representing objects, making space and distance and form, pattern and rhyme and rhythm and, well, things you can recognize. But I came to painting the art dialog in America was one that contrasted a generation who had pushed hard towards pure non-objective abstraction with an eye to seeing the result as a kind of symphonic musical equivalent against what eventually fell to just copying photographs to achieve what was to became a very stark mechanical reality... photo based realism... I wanted to create something else...something that could talk. I liked metaphor, I liked poetry. It isn’t that I didn’t like abstraction, that would be like saying I didn't like music. I did. But there are things non-objective abstraction can’t say...things it won’t talk about even as it is the substructure of everything we see. But while atomic structure is the basis of of all physical existence it really doesn't tell you much about the guy down the street. There are simply subjects on which it is mute due to scale perhaps or focus. So perhaps you can think of what I wanted to do is to put the words to the music. And perhaps a little dance as well. Ballet, Opera...that's a bit more like what I'm talking about. And the camera is just another art form unto itself. The idea of copying what it does just never settled for me. It would be like casting an opera to be sung and acted by the staff of the nightly news. But with recognizable images I could pile up possible meaning to the sky. And as I studied abstraction along the way and realized that all art is abstract the need to focus on abstraction as the end and the means just disappeared. Well it didn't really disappear completely...It became the spirit of the work that gave it energy. You could say it disappeared into the work itself as I was making. And as it did I was free to once again make pictures of things…images,…figures! I was free to follow the urge that people have followed for perhaps 10,000 years! To make images of the world I live in. Without having to apologize to the modern or now post modern academie. It is an authoritarian wall one must climb if you want the grants, the shows, to be in the collections served by the galleries...
I don’t really care about post modernism. No more than it cares about me. I don't really care for any -ism at all any longer. So some time ago I began just making pictures without regret. I began building an iconography of images that seemed meaningful to me on a variety of levels…more recently because of a medical impediment I have come to doing watercolors. While the impediment has limited my mobility and physical strength I am still able to see and to paint. At this time the things I am painting are landscapes primarily. From time to time I paint my friends, or perhaps a still life. But what has attracted me of late, perhaps because it is hard for me to get out into nature is nature itself. The land. The places I can or have visited. When I travel I paint from direct observation as often as I am able. But I continue after the fact from memory...and that memory may be purely from my mental picture of a place or as often as not enhanced either by previous paintings and sketches or from photos or a bit of both. Unlike the more metaphorical work of my past these are immediate. A sense of what I saw, what I felt letting you decipher what it means. These, at this juncture in time, are not so much ABOUT something as they are OF something. This is a way of working that I have not pursued as such since I was an art student. Perhaps it is because I feel I have cheated death and that to simply be here is now imperative. At this moment in time I'm not questioning the work so much as simply responding. Maybe in a period of time this will change again to something that begs you to wonder what it means. At the moment it simply means that God turned on the sun (or however you understand the sun to exist) and it shines through layers of atmosphere and it reflects off of water and ice and rock and sand and casts shadows through objects like trees and hills and grass and houses and these abstract shapes and colors and textural patterns of light and dark create the reality we all see together in our varying perceptions.
e-Book Catalog for Midwest Dialog available at Barnes and Noble for $6.99. See link below...
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/s/Walter-King-Midwest-Dialog?store=ebook&keyword=Walter+King%3A+Midwest+Dialog
Walter King: Midwest Dialog (a 40 year retrospective is over but the POD catalog is available for $13.50 at the address below. I'm not taking any profit from the sale of these catalogs at this time to keep the price down. SEE THE ADDRESS BELOW:
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/walter-king-midwest-dialog/12449100
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