John R Walker Self-portrait

Asked about the challenge of doing a self portrait, John Walker chuckles. “He’s a tricky, slippery customer. I’ve been trying to do a self portrait on and off for years – and mostly it’s been a complete and utter disaster.”

This one came about because Walker was having a spanking new studio built for himself in Braidwood, NSW, where he lives. “I couldn’t get away from the place because I needed to be there for the builders so when it was nearly finished I thought, ‘let’s have a go at it, start with a painting of me and make [the studio] fly.’ But it was rubbish so I scraped that one off and almost decided not to bother.”

Then one day, after a month or so, he suddenly saw it in his mind’s eye and rang the builder to tell him not to come the next day. It was painted quickly and when Walker’s wife Ann saw it, she said: “that’s you, you’ve pinned the bastard,” recalls the artist.

Walker says he followed the usual process. “I did a few sketches and guaches and when I was painting I had the mirror there but I never work directly when I’m painting people, I try to catch people without looking at them. I’ve got to see it inside myself before I can put it down. It’s all about imagination. I can’t paint it unless I can imagine it in my head but I can’t imagine it unless I’ve spent a long time looking at it.”

As for colour: “colour is everything,” says Walker. “Colour is the visual equivalent of music. Oliver Sachs wrote an essay about an artist who lost the ability to see colour and as a result couldn’t deal with depth and space. Colour is everything to me, it’s space.”
Born in Sydney in 1957, Walker did an Art Diploma at the Alexander Mackie College, Sydney. He has exhibited annually since 1979 with regular solo exhibitions at Utopia Art in Sydney since 1989 and four solo shows in St Louis, USA. His work has been seen in numerous major group shows, including the Wynne and Sulman Prizes at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. This is his fourth time as an Archibald finalist.