'Up to the Highest Point' Painting

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2019 b.1969 Walker’s practice derives from an exploration of the environment primarily through walking, his most  recent work involves collecting specific data on each walk, the length, the pace, the altitude or number of steps etc. and translating the data into a painting. These ‘potential landscapes’ are paintings of the activity of walking and painting, but also of time and distance. It is these additional spatial and temporal qualities that he is keen to express in his work, whether through constructed landscapes or from a direct observation of the environment. They assimilate and estimate, showing structure, infrastructure and metastructure, moments of clarity break down to reveal the fragility of the image, they act as a record of both the activity of the artist in the landscape but also in the studio. His relationship with the landscape has also changed and what once might have been described as homage to the environment has now become something more adversarial, with each body of work beginning to question the value of human activity; whether this is the construction of our cities, our stewardship of the environment or the role of the artist as a witness and how this can be expressed, particularly but not exclusively, through painting.