Posted inArt

Paintings Like Sand in Your Teeth: John Walker at Seal Point

Disclosure, in John Walker’s paintings, comes slowly. A dominant motif — zigzag stripes ranging up, down and across the canvas — colonizes the surface, establishing it as a realm of aggressively brushed abstract patterns. Then one by one, various incidentals emerge — a densely wooded island, a rocky outcropping, the flat disk of the sun — and suddenly you’re looking at a vertically tilted, crazily Cubistic landscape.

Posted inArt

Beer with a Painter: John Walker

I have long admired John Walker’s work for its unique combination of tough materialism and romantic lyricism. I recently met him in his studio at Boston University, where he is the head of the MFA program. My visit with Walker happened to take place on the Thursday after the Boston Marathon tragedy, and I spent Friday’s citywide lockdown with painters Gideon Bok and Meghan Brady.