In some of his more recent paintings Walker seems to have committed himself much more definitively to representation than in his earlier work. Muddy Cove is one of a series of landscapes derived from the coast of Maine, and within the series it is at the representational end of the spectrum. Whereas in Form and Gardenia the illusionistic gardenia was the intruder in the painting, here it would seem that the “form” -- a heavily contoured hourglass that recurs throughout the Maine series and that defines itself more as shape than as the depiction of a pool of water -- is intruding into a painting that is otherwise surprisingly similar to Winslow Homer’s Maine coastal scenes.

A closer look indicates that it is not so simple. Nominally representational, the entire painting simultaneously operates very successfully as an abstract, two-dimensional composition. The very straight horizon line divides the rectangle of the canvas into two sub-rectangles, one long and narrow, the other almost square. The spacious, atmospheric sunset in the upper section leads us into measureless distance, but in the much larger lower section of the painting surfaces predominate over spatial clues. The heavy impasto near the bottom seems to translate paint literally into mud, but the light brown squiggles above and to the left are painterly gestures before they are representatives of anything in the real world. All over the painting the brilliance of Walker’s brushwork carries us back and forth between spatial illusion and articulated surface.

The same year as the Maine landscapes Walker was producing a very different series of paintings, inspired by his father’s experience in the First World War and incorporating long passages of writing, but minimizing spatial references. Like Gottlieb with his pictographs (see catalogue no. 7), Walker is operating with the two primary paths to description of the world, word and image. Gottlieb had aimed at finding a unified territory in between the two; Walker straddles both while emphasizing their difference.

Timothy Riggs

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