Caroline Walker: On Solitude

Caroline Walker, Table Laying, Late Morning, May 2020, oil on canvas (artist copyright)

 

On a walk round the autumn sales exhibition at Sothebys last year there were a few works that really jumped out: a smallish Francis Bacon that dominated a room containing a much larger Rodin; an Anselm Kiefer so vast you would need an aircraft hangar to keep it in; and downstairs a painting by Caroline Walker (above) from the series devoted to her mother Janet. Someone bought the painting in the auction and I hope they were as excited as I would be if I were the successful bidder.

I've been looking at and thinking about Walker's work since we met by chance at Hatchards bookshop on Piccadilly before the pandemic. I'd never seen one of her paintings at that point, and when I did get to stand in front of one (at Victoria Miro, I think) my reaction to the work was inevitably influenced by my recollection of her as a disarmingly funny, rather watchful person who warned me that if I googled her name I would have to navigate past an artist who made light-hearted paintings of cows. I doubt this is the case today, with Walker enjoying a growing international reputation. Her exhibition Mothering - now at Pallant House after a successful run at Hepworth Wakefield - has attracted more critical interest than most out-of-London shows.

Caroline Walker, Me & Laurie 6 Weeks Old, 2024, oil on board (artist copyright)

 

I've been enjoying her book of the same name, although as is often the way with art books the experience of looking at the small printed versions of her paintings is nothing like that of standing among them; her paintings are often cinematic in scale, with life-size figures - a reflection perhaps of her interest in film (she would make a great cinematographer). Although Walker does base her paintings on photographs so perhaps it's fitting to see her work in reproduction like this, at several removes and leaps in scale from the real moment that originally inspired her.

What is it that makes Walker's paintings stand out so boldly from the crowd? For a start it's unusual for a contemporary artist to show us real scenes and situations in the way that Walker does. Catching sight of her painting across the room there's an immediate, vivid impression of the scene depicted. We're used to quickly seizing on and identifying images these days, and with Walker the subject is often immediately itself. 

Clearly this is no accident. Walker talks with unusual candour and thoughtfulness about her own work, often drawing attention to her choice of subject matter. In recent years she has focused on the work that women tend to do, from domestic chores to child-raising (paid and unpaid). With Mothering this includes her own experience as a mum twice over, an experience she has analysed (and continues to investigate) with the rigour of a social scientist.

Anyone who has spent time looking at Victorian art will be aware how easy it is for depictions of children to slide into sentimentality, but I think Walker is too tough for that. When asked at a recent event how - in light of this challenge - she goes about painting youngsters she replied with typical disarming humour, 'Well I always try to remember that the head's going to be very big, you know disproportionally big.' A child in a painting is primarily another visual problem to solve.

So there's a sense in which Walker is a hard-nosed documentary maker but her paintings are not simply statements of fact. Her artistic process involves taking numerous photos, setting them aside for a while, then going back to them and either selecting the most interesting one or combining several to create a composition. She then makes drawings (I think to puzzle out the values) and, when she is ready, sets about painting with sureness and vigour. At different stages in this process the moment to be depicted is selected (for design, palette, light, mood), cropped, edited, simplified into lights and darks, and then re-imagined fairly rapidly in paint on canvas. 

Which is a lengthy way of saying that each painting is a carefully considered and yet spontaneous creative act. Walker is a 21st century Scottish Colourist, both controlled and flamboyant.

Caroline Walker, Desayuno, 2017, oil on linen (artist copyright)

When I met Caroline Walker she had been experimenting with different genres and approaches, on the one hand making documentary paintings of women working in nail bars and on the other visiting Palm Spring and LA, where she directed professional models in carefully staged scenes. These paintings have cinematic qualities of tension and anxiety, but on her return to the UK Walker turned away from this approach and back to documentary. 

For the series Home, made with the charity Women for Refugee Women and exhibited at Kettle's Yard, she could not direct the women who posed for her as she had her American models. The photo shoots were sometimes stressful, reflecting the difficult life situations of these vulnerable women, but Walker's tangential, glance-from-the-corner-of-the-eye approach proved a good one and the resulting paintings are both intimate and powerful.   

Caroline Walker, Joy, 11.30am Hackney, 2017, oil on linen (artist copyright)

If this was a tricky assignment then Walker's next major series was in some ways more challenging. Having spent the previous years searching for inspiration among unfamiliar people and places, she turned her attention to the most familiar person and place she knew. The painting series Janet (Ingelby Gallery 2020) is a sort of fly-on-the-wall documentary following Walker's mother on her daily round of chores, a project I imagine both women began in some trepidation given that it would bring public attention to their personal lives. 

But this of course is what makes the paintings so fascinating: Janet's everyday world is intensely private, shared once upon a time by her children, one of whom happened to become an artist with an uncanny ability to conjure magic out of ordinary domestic spaces... Given their shared history Walker must have felt she was viewing her mother through time as well as in space, and I think maybe it's this that lends the paintings their strange, haunting beauty. Janet herself remains (to my eye) rather remote, tantalisingly unknowable even to (perhaps especially to?) her own daughter. 

Just to add another layer of generational complexity, Caroline herself was pregnant while working on this series and now has two children of her own. They appear here and there in Mothering as do other members of her family. Maybe art historians of the future will place Walker's work within the context of the private-is-public social media world, and yes these colour-soaked, eminently instagrammable paintings are certainly of our time.

Caroline Walker, Daphne, 2021, oil on linen (artist copyright)

But I don't think we should focus solely on the contemporaneity of these paintings any more than we should on Walker's choice of motifs. My personal favourite in the current exhibition is Daphne, a typically large-format depiction of the view through a wide downstairs window into the living room where Walker's young daughter can be seen. This was a moment seized by the artist (who rushed out via the open door on the right to take the photo) and then lovingly reimagined. We may notice the framing first - all that blue - and then the bold darks and lights of houseplant and ceiling lamps and then, her head framed between cushions, the little girl. She is inseparable at this moment from the interior with its honeyed light, a child at home where she belongs and perhaps just coming into awareness of this fact; her mother is outside among the blue shadows, looking in.

We all view art through the filter of our own experiences and predelicitions, and subject-wise what I love most about Caroline Walker's paintings is her representation of solitude. Not loneliness (although solitude can be lonely, of course) but the experience of being what we all are: an individual with our own inner life. The people she depicts are often lost in thought, viewed (even when close up) across the space that separates one person from another.

Caroline Walker: Mothering is at Pallant House, Chichester, until 26 April.