- Thornton Walker

Of Possibility and Paradox.
Patrick Hutchings
The Age September 15 2007
New Zealand painter Thornton Walker proves himself to be a master of illusions as he
searches for the meaning of life through his works, writes Patrick Hutchings.
Thornton Walker fills the wide, white spaces of
the Christine Abrahams Gallery with paintings
that ask the Buddhist question: “What is the
enduring body of reality?” His paintings of
oriental bowls on abstract planes, or on
deliberately distressed canvas, are responses to
this Zen koan. It has no answer. But Walker said
to me – half in earnest, half in jest: “One reply
could be, ‘ceramic bowls’”, adding at once. “Not
that they are real bowls, just paintings of them,
‘ceci n’est pas une pipe’, as Magritte put it.”
The beautiful illusionary bowls manifest on
surfaces of raked paint: God’s thumbprint, the
gravel of a Zen garden, or ploughed soil. They
grow out of tillage.
One had always thought of the bowls as being
centres of meditation: what is left after the total illusion of being has been almost
evaporated. Now I think the bowls are the first things to come back from positive
nothingness. This may be mere fancy, but it is reinforced by the artist putting his
inscriptions on the canvases in mirror writing. This he borrows from his four-year-old
daughter Polly who can write equally well either way.
Walker’s backgrounds, as in The Enduring Body II, can be interrupted on the edges by
ominous black, long clubs, bridge-like
forms: or as in The Records (Breath) by
breaths, thought-balloons without topics,
suggestions of possibilities not yet
manifested. The Records take their titles
from the writings of the Japanese monk
Basho Matsuo (1644-1694) whose book,
The Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel,
Walker has always about his studio.
There
are
suggestions
of
possibilities
not
yet
manifested
in
Thornton
Walker’s
The
Records
(Breath),
2006
(top)
and
Doubts
of
One
Kind
and
Another
(I)
(2007)
(bottom).
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The faintly eroded look of Walker’s backgrounds alludes to this travel-wornness,
perhaps. For the rest it is a function of the fracture. The paintings’ impasto surfaces,
which are trowelled on with acrylic resin, crushed marble and earth pigments, are left to
dry for 24 hours, then scrubbed and hosed down. The delicacy of the hyper-real
porcelains belies the process of the manufacture of the paintings, in which they exert
their irresistible attraction.
In the most recent Zen paintings there are large – almost golden-section – areas of the
surface in a negative black. The negation of the negation in Doubts of One Kind and
Another has the banishing of illusion itself calls into question. Scratched, roughly
inscribed, these bits of darkness visible are slightly disturbing, balanced as they are by
illusionary bowls whose painted illusionistic-reality reassures us.
Walker is New Zealand born, and black is the colour of New Zealand light – or of its
shadow – and black has become, in the words of fellow artists Colin McCahon and Ralph
Hotere, canonical. In McCahon, Hotere and Walker the colour behaves differently: but its
uses have a family resemblance.
In the smaller of the galleries Walker continues his deconstruction of Picasso’s La Flûte
de Pan. Pan and his flute have always been omitted, leaving only an architectural
setting. This has now been erased, and we are left with, as it were, sea and windbuffeted pieces of sailcloth with square windows cut into them, through which we see
what may – or may not – be blue sea and horizon. Sometimes this illusion has itself
been fragmented. In one painting blue areas conjoin, but vertically, leaving us visually
flabbergasted. Even the earth’s universal line of vision and division has been robbed of
its irreducibility. In the Zen spirit, Walker, a master illusionist, leaves us with no
illusions, here.
There are four self-portraits in the show, less self-flattering than angst-ridden, the
painted ones less so than the engraved ones in Walker’s recent Australian Print
Workshop Fellowship exhibition. The painter’s face in the looking-glass is the seeming of
a seeming; or so it seems.
The West asks about the origin of being. In the Orient it is sometimes said to arise out of
nothing. Being human gives rise to desire: it is by getting rid of passions that the person
becomes enlightened, and escapes the wheel of eternal return. Salvation is into “plentiful
nothingness”.
But for both the East and the West, life is a problematic business. Metaphysical solutions
are always a bit thin. Nirvana itself is, is found in, a moment in which being and nonbeing become identical: an ultimate paradox.
Walker’s particular Zen balancing of is and is not reminds me of the philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein who wrote: “The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of
the problem” (Tractatus 6.521).
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