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 Springs 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.  

Edward Seago - New Book Out in June!

It's almost two years since I was asked by the Seago estate to write the text for a book which is, first and foremost, a gallery of paintings from a remarkable life. Thanks to the hard work of staff at the Portland Gallery and the efforts of the production team at Lund Humphries, this will be a beautiful book. There is even a foreword by the Prince of Wales. Here's the blurb:

This is the definitive account of the life and work of Edward Seago (1910-1974), the highly popular, versatile and talented British painter whose work was inspired by John Sell Cotman, John Constable and Alfred Munnings.

Over two hundred colour reproductions are complemented by an engaging text which highlights important periods, episodes and acquaintances from Seago’s life and career. Full of anecdotes, sketches and quotations from the artist’s books and correspondence, the author provides a vivid impression of Seago's character which helps inform discussion of the outstanding imagery which he created.

Including important examples of works from all stages of Seago's career, this book reproduces beautiful landscapes, vibrant circus images, dramatic seascapes and paintings inspired by the artist's travels aboard. A true celebration of a powerful body of 20th-century British painting, Edward Seago will be an invaluable addition to the libraries of collectors, dealers and enthusiasts alike.

'Edward Seago' will be published by Lund Humphries in June 2014. You can pre-order at my favourite art bookshop... here. The latest LH catalogue is here.

To coincide with the publication, Portland Gallery will be holding a wide-ranging exhibition of Seago's work - more info from the gallery.

Popular Painters: Jack Vettriano & Edward Seago

Jack Vettriano, Self-Portrait (artist's copyright)

A couple of years ago I was chatting with the director of a provincial museum. This museum does not have much public funding and so has to charge admission, and he was describing the challenges of persuading people to pay the small sum asked of them. In recent times, he said, only one artist had really drawn the crowds, and that was Jack Vettriano (b.1951). As he mentioned the name he looked to see my reaction, which was not (I have to say) desperately enthusiastic. I had been to the exhibition in question and found it rather soulless. However, I could see that the show's success had been significant, both financially and in terms of increasing awareness of the museum and its architectural and artistic wonders.

Jack Vettriano is that rare creature, a painter whose activities arouse strong feelings in all kinds of people, from his famous collectors and feisty fans to the critics who are shocked and appalled by his success. His current retrospective in Glasgow has attracted some negative write-ups, while his supporters have used the 21st century soapbox of the on-line comments section to air their views.

Jack Vettriano, Along Came a Spider (artist's copyright)

To date I think the best article on him is Lynn Barber's interview from 2004, when Vettriano was in the limelight after 'The Singing Butler' achieved the highest price for a Scottish painting at auction. She was straightforward as usual. 'Anyway,' she wrote, 'the fact that there is all this exciting 'story' in the images makes it easy to ignore the deadly flatness of the technique.

'This is the answer to the question: why don't art critics take Vettriano seriously? Because there is nothing of any interest in the way he paints - Vettriano is to painting what Jeffrey Archer is to prose. Nevertheless, he is very interesting both as a person and as a phenomenon; a self-taught painter who, by depicting his own fantasies, has somehow managed to reach an audience who don't normally take any interest in art. He is also - I was pleased to discover - a very modest, articulate, friendly interviewee.'

Jack Vettriano, The Singing Butler (artist's copyright)

Whatever his weaknesses as a painter, Vettriano does what he does very well. He is so consistent that you can identify one of his pictures instantly, and he has a talent for making images that are slightly mysterious, nostalgic and glamorous (in the 1980s Helmut Newton sense). His men and women remind me of characters from old hard-boiled detective novels and thrillers, or perhaps that's the lighting. The scenes hover between eras from the 1920s to the present, without really belonging anywhere - they are fanciful rather than historical. The kinkier pictures are un-PC but, in the great scheme of things, hardly shocking. Beyond that, what is there to say? Except that struggling art museums HAVE TO attract big crowds, or they will not survive.

I find Vettriano's case intriguing partly because I've just finished writing a book about landscape painter Edward Seago (1910-74), which will be published by Lund Humphries next year. In his lifetime Seago was hugely popular, to the extent that the queues before his exhibitions were reported in the press.

Edward Seago, The Wild Beast Show, 1932 (artist's estate/Portland Gallery)

‘Queue Here for Seago’, announced the Eastern Daily Press on 22 November 1961: 'At 5 o’clock this morning, two old ladies dropped anchor outside Colnaghi’s gallery in Bond Street. By 9 o’clock, when the floodgates opened, the waiting multitude looked like a convention of Top People. Another private view of watercolours by Edward Seago, the Norfolk artist, had begun.

'Having pounced on their prey, the Seago-seekers had to stand at attention for another hour while the embargo printed in red on their invitation cards ran out: "It is regretted that no Drawings can be sold before 10am on the day of the Private View."'

Edward Seago, Winter Landscape, Norfolk , c1960 (artist's estate/Portland Gallery)

Like Vettriano, Seago was hard-working, prolific and an astute businessman - he sent out 5000 personal Christmas cards to collectors every year and exhibited all over the world. He was modest, charming, entertaining and self-centred (a not unusual quality); he was greatly loved but rather unhappy, and his behaviour was at times quite odd - researching his life and work has been fascinating.

His paintings, mostly landscapes in oils and watercolour, were immediately recognisable and often delightful. With the art world going crazy for abstraction and dour post-war introspection, art lovers looking for something enjoyable and uplifting found it in Seago, whose self-avowed mission was to record the fleeting beauties of nature. The Queen Mother and the Duke of Edinburgh were fans, even friends; the critics were not. I doubt there was an artist who outsold Seago in his pomp during the 1950s and 1960s. He handled paint with considerable skill and also wrote entertainingly, penning a number of thoughtful autobiographical books. Not all of his paintings are great, but the best of them can make you pause, look again, relax and give in to the pleasure of looking.

'Edward Seago' will be published by Lund Humphries in June 2014. His estate is represented by The Portland Gallery.