Ben Walker
Featured Artist
Volume One, Issue Three, “Plein Air,” Visual Art
Ben Walker, Recordings from the Other World, 2020, Oil on canvas.
My most recent paintings refer to a distinct era of British culture and TV programmes and films — 1970s and 1980s educational programmes for schools, childrens’ films and public information films. Looking back, television broadcasts and films from this time often seemed imbued with a strange, otherly quality. For example, Children of the Stones, an HTV production from 1977, was concerned with subject matter and atmospheres that seemed odd or even unsettling for a broadcast aimed at children — eerily presented supernatural forces and the breakdown of normal society.
It is the setting of these films or images that is especially important to me, which draw heavily on relationships to the rural landscape, and present that landscape as a place that "seems to offer security and yet it is somehow the location of menaces far more profound than those found in the city."1 This is central to defining the overall mood of the paintings. Much of the source imagery seems familiar, comforting, and yet it is also unsettling or eerie. These qualities in the paintings, which are impressions of half-remembered, misremembered or an imagined past, exist on the edges of memory and nostalgia where ideas of folklore, the unknown, the wyrd, science fiction and the supernatural mesh together. Embedded in these paintings is the loss of childhood innocence and, with it, the death of a bygone utopia.
My paintings are created on coarse-textured linen. The oil paint, thinned with turps, is scrubbed into the weave of the linen, and then may be removed and repainted over and over. Consequently, traces of earlier incarnations often remain visible in the finished picture, articulating the hauntological theme of the past repeating into the present.
Ben Walker, This Day Has Robbed Us of Our Vitality, 2020, Oil on canvas.
Ben Walker, Who Wants to Go to Heaven, 2020, Oil on canvas.
Ben Walker, Village Green, 2020, Oil on canvas.
Ben Walker, Their Memories, 2020, Oil on canvas.
Ben Walker, Reunion Wilderness I, 2020, Oil on canvas.
Ben Walker, Reunion Wilderness II, 2020, Oil on canvas.
Ben Walker, Reunion Wilderness III, 2020, Oil on canvas.
Ben Walker, Reunion Wilderness IV, 2020, Oil on canvas.
Ben Walker, Reunion Wilderness V, 2020, Oil on canvas.
Ben Walker was born in Cheshire and lives and works in Kent. He is a painter with an interest in English landscape, folk horror, Factory Records and a distinct era of British culture and TV programmes and films — 1970s and 80s educational programmes for schools, childrens’ tv programmes and public information films. He studied at Sheffield Hallam University and Wimbledon School of Art. He has exhibited widely, including at Transition Gallery and Charlie Smith London, and in the Marmite Prize, and in 2012 won the Jack Goldsmith Painting Prize. He studied on the Turps Correspondence Course 2018-19, and had work selected for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2019. He has curated group shows in London and Cambridge. He has work in private collections in the UK, the US, Canada, Ireland, Europe, India and Japan.