Mike Walker

Artist Statement

There are certain key words that I use to describe to myself what is happening in my paintings.  One of those words is field.  These paintings are fields: there is a surface, an area of activity, and I look for ways of filling that surface and keeping a tension across every part of it.  On the whole I’m using what have come to be called all-over fields, in which each part of the field is as important as every other part.  You can do that by having very little going on or, as with my paintings, having an awful lot going on.  I fill that field to bursting point but I do so using sections: I divide the field up into sections early on, sometimes right at the beginning, and each section is a small version of the field as a whole.  Sometimes the sections are very obvious but at others their boundaries have been so over-run you can hardly see them at all.  There is a continuous tension, from one work to the next, between the way these individual sections assert themselves and their absorption into the overall field.

What might not come across in this description is that the field is charged: it is an activated space, like a magnetic field, and every mark is a kind of force that operates across it.  When I’m painting I am in that field and each new line is connected to all previous lines and, in turn, is suggestive of the next.  There is an inter-relatedness to everything that happens within the borders of the field.  What is also hard to describe is the way in which another boundary – that between myself and not myself – is dissolved in this process.  There is no separation between thinking and the painting coming into being or, to put that another way, painting is thinking; making the painting is the formulation of the thought of the painting, it is coming into being as it progresses as surely as thinking of what to say or making music.  What I have also come to realise, or rather to understand through reading Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s writings, is the way in which we think through our bodies.  Painting, it seems to me, is one of the clearest manifestations of this idea.

If these works evoke Jackson Pollock’s paintings then it isn’t because I am in any way trying to imitate or pastiche those paintings, it is rather because Pollock was one of the first artists, in my view, to express his thinking in this way.  I do not worry too much about influence.  I allow myself to make the paintings I want to make.  There are many other factors that have gone into their development and thematic, or perhaps metaphorical, concerns that are interwoven with formal considerations but for the most part I leave these unstated, preferring to let the viewer read into them what they will.