The kind of postcard image I liked to copy.
I was born in the fishing port of Grimsby in 1938 into a working class family living in a terrace house near the fish docks where my father worked filleting fish. As child I loved to draw and paint, so that by the time I was five my ambition in life was to become an artist. (This ambition was never fulfilled in the sense that I was never able to make a living as a professional artist. Mostly I worked as an art critic/historian and university lecturer.)
During the Second World War my father was a soldier and was sent to invade Norway. When he returned he brought back picture postcards and tourist books about the country celebrating the beauty of its fjords and mountains. One of my earliest memories of making art was copying some of these rather kitsch images. (None of these works survive.) So I was doing pop art without knowing it. During the years of war-time shortages and post-war austerity, coloured images were rare. Most films shown in the cinema were black and white. I seemed to develop a hunger for colour images. Copying, of course, is an ancient method of training in art.
At primary school - Holme Hill in Heneage Road - I was encouraged to draw and paint by a kind spinster called Miss Gaine who was also an amateur water colourist.
As a teenager I drew and painted from nature in the several traditional genres: still life, landscape and portraiture. One gloomy subject that for some reason appealed to me was the lying in state of the coffin of King George VI in 1952 guarded by soldiers and beefeaters in picturesque costumes. I also drew footballers in action - one such drawing was published in the comic The Eagle (David Hockney also had a drawing published in the same comic.)
In 1956 I depicted the main living room of a wooden bungalow at Humberston Fitties, just along the coast from Cleethorpes.
It was one of many such picturesque dwellings, all different in design that sheltered from the winds off the North Sea behind high sand dunes. My parents were able to afford the lease of the bungalow which they used as a holiday home during the summers and at weekends throughout the 1950s. We reached Humberston by bicycle or bus. The bungalow was situated next to an embankment and was reached by a narrow wooden bridge which spanned a small stream. At the rear were farms and fields. It was set in its own acre of ground and, unusually, it was surrounded by apple trees. It only had three rooms: a living room and two bedrooms and so could accommodate four people.
There was no electricity and so at night a large oil lamp was lit. There was no running water either. The latter had to be fetched daily in jugs from a communal pump a few hundred yards away. When the weather was warm we lived mainly on salads and sandwiches. My mother prepared hot meals - mostly fry-ups - on the cast iron stove heated by wood. Tea was brewed in a kettle on a Primus. Appetites were keen due to the salt air and the exercise. Apart from the apples from the nearby trees, most food had to be carried to Humberston although there was a general store on the site.
My sister and I spent hours climbing trees and pursuing newts and frogs in the stream. A short distance away was the beach for constructing elaborate sandcastles, the sea for swimming and the dunes for playing cowboys and Indians. When the tide was out we walked a mile from shore to visit the sinister old fort guarding the entrance of the Humber from German invasion.
Once I attempted something more ambitious - an imaginative fantasy, a sort of history painting with a moral message. Namely, ‘Descent into hell’, a large scale work that condemned humanity for indulging in wine, women, gambling and greed. I suppose this image reflected to some extent the influence of the neo-romantic style fashionable in the 1940s and 1950s. My critical attitude towards contemporary society was to surface again during the 1970s.
An early portrait pencil drawing depicts in profile my grandmother Beel (actually she was not a blood relative because she had adopted my mother). Nana lived with us from the 1940s to her death decades later because during the war her home had been destroyed by Nazi bombs. Her husband was killed but she was dug out of the rubble alive but she had lost her hearing and she also became very nervous. She has a strained expression and sits on the edge of her armchair. The drawing is academic and detailed in style because at that stage I was trying to master the traditional representational skills of Western European art.
My art teacher at Grammar school during the 1950s was Ernest J. Worrall (1898-1972), a figurative painter in oils and watercolour trained at the Royal College of Art. I owe him a debt of gratitude for his encouragement of my work and his help in obtaining a university place. Worrall liked to work in watercolour but using pen and ink outlines. This was a technique I quickly imitated and used to render images of the Lincolnshire countryside. Thorton Abbey Gatehouse, reached by bicycle, for example was one of the subjects I tackled. Plus urban structures such as Spiller’s flour mill in Grimsby. In fact, the latter watercolour was the first painting I managed to sell. It was included in an exhibition of the Lincolnshire Art Society, organised by Worrall. (The show took place in the Town Hall because the provincial town lacked a civic art gallery.)
In 1956 Worrall also organised a coach trip to Manchester in order to visit a major van Gogh exhibition. This was my first exposure to original modern art (as opposed to viewing reproductions) and the aesthetic and emotional impact was tremendous. Earlier I recall studying a set of six posters that appeared in the art room one of which - van Gogh’s sunflowers - made a deep impression on me especially since it contradicted an art rule I had been told - ‘you cannot paint a picture using just one colour’. My first oil painting was a view of Louth church interpreted from a photo found in a guidebook. Since I had no training or advice about how to use and mix oil paints, I found this an extremely demanding task.
In autumn 1956 I began to attend the fine art department of King’s College in Newcastle upon Tyne. Shortly afterwards Worrall commissioned me to paint a narrative, modern history mural to be placed in the entrance hall of Wintringham Boys Grammar School. I was paid only the cost of materials. In 1957 the painting was reviewed by a sixth form pupil called A. G. Beeden in a school magazine (Argus, Vol 2, no. 5, May 1957, p. 10.) - this was my first experience of art criticism.
‘The oil painting by John Walker in the school vestibule was inspired by the tragic loss with all hands of the ‘Rodrigo’ and ‘Larolla’ [Grimsby trawlers, fishing vessels] in January 1956, owing to the action of vhat is known as ‘black frost’ [in Artic waters spray caused ice to form on the superstructures which in turn caused the trawlers to overturn in bad weather; see House of Commons account http://www.theyworkforyou.com/debates/?id=1956-05-16a.2170.0 ].
The great difficulty in painting on such a long canvas is to provide a sufficient number of points of interest while maintaining an overall unity of thought and design. Having decided on his theme, the artist has had four main ‘ideas’: (1) the courage and strength of' the fishermen, (2) the loneliness of the wives and children left at home; (3) the plunging ship and struggling, drowning seamen, (4) the women and children being left desolate - possibly flashing into the minds of the men as they die. One must not expect to be able to read off from left to right a complete sequence of events. The artist is not a camera, nor is he presenting a strip cartoon. Nor must one expect the shape of faces and trees and ships to be quite as you or I would see them. The artist is using form to speak as you or I would use words. The central pair of fishermen cry out ‘here is strength, solidity, courage’. The woman on the left is alone with her babe and lonely (look at the flatness of her face), the angel above her slinks off, Judas-like, having betrayed her trust. (He reminds me of the Treens Dan Dare met in the days when I read the "Eagle".) To the right of the central figures there is an area of confused, forms which for me is the weakest part of the picture. In the right centre the halved sun shines down onto the plunging ship and the men dive overboard into the tossing sea. In the extreme right there is the balancing flash-back to the figure on the extreme left.
For me the painting, as it stands, has been successful in that it has aroused in me sympathetic emotion. My main criticism of it when put under the title "Black Frost" is that nowhere - except perhaps in the sun - do I got any sense of coldness - the overall colour impression is, indeed, pink. The sinking ship is rather uncertain but that is a minor point and I think that the artist has largely succeeded in his difficult task of maintaining interest and cohesion. ’
The Department of Fine Art (also called the King Edward VII School of Art), located within King’s College, a campus situated in Newcastleupon- Tyne, which was then part of the University of Durham. The Department had a long history – its origins can be traced back to 1837. The course was four years long - so it was equivalent to the standard three -year art school course plus the so-called foundation year - but I did an extra year because I was awarded a Hatton Scholarship (a prize that enabled a few students to postpone taking their degree for a year).
My art teacher at Grammar school during the 1950s was Ernest J. Worrall (1898-1972), a figurative painter in oils and watercolour trained at the Royal College of Art. I owe him a debt of gratitude for his encouragement of my work and his help in obtaining a university place. Worrall liked to work in watercolour but using pen and ink outlines. This was a technique I quickly imitated and used to render images of the Lincolnshire countryside. Thorton Abbey Gatehouse, reached by bicycle, for example was one of the subjects I tackled. Plus urban structures such as Spiller’s flour mill in Grimsby. In fact, the latter watercolour was the first painting I managed to sell. It was included in an exhibition of the Lincolnshire Art Society, organised by Worrall. (The show took place in the Town Hall because the provincial town lacked a civic art gallery.)
In 1956 Worrall also organised a coach trip to Manchester in order to visit a major van Gogh exhibition. This was my first exposure to original modern art (as opposed to viewing reproductions) and the aesthetic and emotional impact was tremendous. Earlier I recall studying a set of six posters that appeared in the art room one of which - van Gogh’s sunflowers - made a deep impression on me especially since it contradicted an art rule I had been told - ‘you cannot paint a picture using just one colour’. My first oil painting was a view of Louth church interpreted from a photo found in a guidebook. Since I had no training or advice about how to use and mix oil paints, I found this an extremely demanding task.
In the final year, the degree was awarded on the basis of an exhibition of work plus an art-historical dissertation of 10,000 words. (My subject was van Gogh’s colour theories).
The Department had three schools: painting, sculpture and design. Design included printed textiles and stained glass. In addition to these subjects, basic design, printmaking, life- drawing, and the history of art were taught. During the first year, students were regularly taught in groups; they were set projects and given a range of exercises to perform in formal, classroom-type situations. Like current foundation years, they were exposed to a variety of materials, media and techniques. Again, like present-day foundation courses, the first year served a ‘diagnostic’ function - students could discover what media and practices interested them and suited their abilities. As time passed, students were allowed more and more freedom until their work became entirely self-directed. Students were also encouraged to specialise in particular art forms - in my own case, it was to be painting.
Initially, my life drawings followed the objective path taught by the tutor Eric Dobson but I soon became dissatisfied with the lack of passion and invention associated with this approach. So I began to exaggerate curves and colours as in the nude drawing and painting illustrated below. Dispassionate drawings of naked bodies also ignored their sensual/erotic character. I began to use nature merely as a starting point for distortion and experimentation. My drawings and paintings of the female nude developed sweeping curves that Professor Gowing once characterised as ‘apocalyptic’ (I had to look up the word’s meaning a dictionary). Permission to exaggerate or even alter observed colours I derived from the art of van Gogh and Les Fauves. In two drawings of the nude, the curves became shorter and more pronounced until the result resembled the sinuous rhythms associated with baroque and rococo styles.
Although I was ignorant of the fact when I arrived in autumn 1956, the staff included some of the most prestigious names in British art: Gowing, the director, was a painter, scholar and curator (he was Director from 1948 to 1958; in 1959 Kenneth Rowntree, another painter, replaced him); Victor Pasmore, the master of painting was one of Britain’s leading abstract, constructionist artists; Richard Hamilton, his chief assistant and lecturer in design, was a versatile artist, designer, curator and intellectual who was soon to become known as a ‘father of pop art’. Other staff I remember were: Eric Dobson (drawing and painting lecturer); John McCheyne (master of sculpture); Geoffrey Dudley (sculpture lecturer); Leonard Evetts (master of design); Helen Dalby (textile design lecturer); Louisa Hodgson (teacher of technical methods); John Dunn, who taught ceramics; and three art historians: Quentin Bell - a direct link to the Bloomsbury Group - Ralph B. Holland and Ronald A. Davey; Ian Stephenson and Roy Ascott (students who, after graduating, were employed for a time as studio demonstrators). Scott Campbell, who produced wooden relief constructions made from broken furniture, was an administrative assistant. He, along with two secretaries – Elizabeth Whitfield and Anne Mitcheson, coped with approximately 15 staff and 150 students.
What also made the Department one of the most advanced and progressive in the country was the basic design course – referred to then as ‘basic form’ or the ‘foundation course’ - that was taught to first year students in groups and in blocks of time. Students were set exercises addressing the fundamentals of all art and design, that is, point, line, shape, colour, tone, texture, form, structure and space. We were also instructed in techniques favoured by surrealists such as Max Ernst, frottage for example. The basic design exercises taught at Newcastle and a few other art schools in the 1950s were influenced by natural science, modern science and technology. They were an attempt to introduce objective, analytical and rational methods into art education to counter the emphasis on intuition and self-expression, the development of personal touch or ‘handwriting’ and pictorial styles. They have been described in detail in several publications, so I will not repeat their contents here. However, one of these publications - The Developing Process (1959) - appeared during my time as a student; it illustrated anonymous examples of the kind of work produced as a result of the exercises we were set. In fact, this booklet was a joint venture between the art departments of King’s College and Leeds University and was published to accompany an exhibition held at the ICA in London. The show and the booklet naturally communicated to us a sense that we were participating in an art-educational experiment of national importance. One purpose of the basic design course was to provide all students with a common starting point; another was to destroy any preconceptions about the nature of art that students might have acquired at primary and secondary schools. In 1956, I was unaware that the exercises set were derived from the preliminary course at the Bauhaus established by Johannes Itten in 1919, from the Thinking Eye notebooks of Paul Klee, and from books on organic form and natural processes such as D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917). Hamilton’s exercises derived from Thompson drew attention to the creation of natural forms via the action of outer and inner forces; thus, they emphasized dynamism, processes, and transformations over time.
Although I still believe the basic design course represented the most advanced art-educational ideas available in Britain during the 1950s, in terms of the continent of Europe most of those ideas were decades old. Furthermore, in Britain - unlike Germany - the basic design course exercises were disconnected for the most part from industrial design and architecture (although Pasmore himself was involved in architecture and Hamilton was involved with graphic and industrial design), and took place in a socio-political vacuum. At Newcastle, the only logical outcome of basic design course exercises for the fine art students appeared to be abstract paintings and constructions. (This is what happened in my own case and in the case of painters like Matt Rugg, Ian Stephenson, Noel Forster and Mary Webb.) In Hamilton’s opinion, such an outcome was a ‘distortion’ of basic design studies. In his view, their general purpose was to stimulate in students ‘a plastic sensibility’. However, their formal and analytical character did encourage abstraction. Students were taught to analyse and explore the elements of art and design but little or no advice was given concerning their re-combination or synthesis; the issue of content was also neglected even though Hamilton’s first pop paintings were rich in subject matter.
Unfortunately, there was little demand for abstract painting in Britain during the late 1950s and early 1960s; consequently, my prospects of making a living as a painter after art school were virtually nil. (And so it was to prove.
My first, large rotation painting dated from 1958 and was based on observation of a female nude. However, turning the picture soon resulted in a virtually abstract composition. In this painting, the aim was to combine the emphatic brushstrokes of van Gogh and Cézanne with the colour of Les Fauves, and to achieve rhythms by repeating colour accents. The use of cold and warm hues created a push-pull effect previously described by Hans Hofmann. The intuitive brushstrokes constituted a multidirectional network that was in tension with a rough grid of curves and squares. Spatial ambiguities resulted from the fact that the brushstrokes stressed the flat surface but also carved into the space behind, cubist fashion. Pictorial ambiguities and contradictions meant that this painting could be viewed for hours without exhausting its ‘content’.
Several of my square paintings were rotated by 45 degrees on the wall so that they became diamond-shaped. I had been intrigued by the idea that one could turn a painting around as one worked on it so that notions of top and bottom, left and right, were negated and that the result could then be hung in eight possible ways. Mondrian’s so-called ‘losangique’ (lozenge-shaped) paintings begun in 1918 and Pollock’s ‘all over’ compositions executed on the floor were the sources for this idea.
Despite the continuation of instruction in ancient, academic practices such as life-drawing, the main, underlying aesthetic ideology of the Department was modernism. (It could be argued there were several varieties of modernism; the one at Newcastle was depoliticised even though Hamilton was a Labour Party supporter.) During the 1930s, Gowing and Pasmore had belonged to the Euston Road School and both had been strongly influenced by post-impressionism. Many students regarded the art of Cézanne, Degas, Seurat, Gauguin and Van Gogh as their natural starting points. In my own case, I had been overwhelmed by the large-scale Van Gogh exhibition, which had toured Britain in 1955. Van Gogh’s bold use of colour was to influence my painting immensely and 1also wrote about his colour theories to fulfil the final year art-history requirement. Cézanne was another important influence. Therefore, it seemed logical for a young painter to begin with the post-impressionists and then to work one’s way through the subsequent evolution of modern art - fauvism, cubism, Mondrian and De Stijl, etc. - until one reached the present day. In retrospect, it appears that the implicit assumption was that the evolution of modern art was a linear and logical progression towards abstraction (this was certainly Pasmore’s view and the story of his own artistic development). At the end of the course, one emerged into the world with a style of art that matched the most up-to-date style then current (in my own case, hard-edge abstraction).
Although my main paintings became abstract some rather different images - surrealistic gouaches and collages - appeared in a sketchbook entitled The Eye Betrayed. A selection below:
In the sculpture school the first exercise set was again very simple: ‘make a cube out of clay’. While some students built a cube from small balls of clay, others used a spatula to slice a cube from a large lump of clay. Dudley, the tutor, was then able to point out that we had intuitively demonstrated the two, main, traditional methods of making sculpture - modelling and carving. A third method - the construction of armatures and structures from hand-twisted wire or welded-metal rods – had been exemplified in the early 1950s by the ‘Geometry of Fear’ sculptures of Reg Butler and others. Pasmore’s works with relief elements and his three-dimensional constructions made from Perspex and wood supplied a fourth method.
I bought carving and chiselling tools plus an overall from the Department’s shop and tried my hand at wood and stone carving for some months, but it proved physically exhausting, dirty and slow - it took a long time to discover one’s original conception had been poor, or that the material had a flaw inside. Finding, affording and moving heavy blocks of stone or lumps of wood were also constant problems. I found it quicker and easier to construct sculptures from wire covered with white plaster (the result was somewhat similar to a bundle of barbed wire). An abstract sculpture of this kind was selected for the ‘Young Contemporaries’ exhibition held in London in 1958. Naturally, I was delighted when a photograph of it appeared in the N.U.S. News (the National Union of Students newspaper) but above the anonymous review was the negative headline ‘Exhibitionism mars this show’.
My paintings had been influenced by Van Gogh’s colour and his colour theory (certain remarks in his letters implied a completely abstract kind of art consisting of arrangements of pure colours), by Pasmore’s conviction that modern art’s destiny was abstraction, by the basic design course idea that art consisted of fundamental elements. My aim had been to reduce painting to its basic constituents: flat fields of pigment; just two complementary colours of equal saturation were needed - cadmium red and viridian green - to achieve surface flatness and a simultaneous contrast giving rise to an optical flicker where the two colours met. To compensate for the lack of figuration or content, the canvases had to be big, and the hues intense. The intention was to overwhelm the viewer’s optical system. Shape and form posed constant problems because colour, like water, can assume any shape. When I asked Pasmore about this in a tutorial, his advice was to ‘deduce’ forms from the shape of support one was using.
Around 1960, I began to produce shaped supports with internal patterns of red/green stripes echoing the outer form of the support and with optical illusion effects. I knew Frank Stella’s monochrome stripe paintings via reproductions in the catalogue Sixteen Americans (New York: MoMA, 1959).
Optical illusions and eye-dazzling patterns found in psychology of perception textbooks and in the work of Vasarély interested and influenced a few students at Newcastle.
My first final degree show mounted in the Hatton Gallery in 1960 revealed a consistent and logical development, a progression from small to large canvases, from figuration to abstraction. This, I believe, is what tutors and external assessors were looking for. However, having won the Hatton Scholarship to remain for a further year, I became dissatisfied with adjusting fields of red and green.
Below two installation shots of second final show held in 1961 showing examples of constructed and assemblage type sculpture made in the last years of my course.
Sexual desire is normally at its height during a male’s teenage and early manhood years. This was certainly true in the case of the British art student John A. Walker who, in the late 1950s and early 196os, was studying fine art at a university art department in Newcastle upon Tyne. Sexual imagery first began to appear in his cubist style reliefs such as ‘Wooden diversion’ (1960, lost or destroyed) and in his dreams, drawings and paintings. Witness the pen and ink drawing ‘Phallus’ (1960) and the oil painting ‘Dream symbol’ (1960, lost or destoyed) with its sperm-like image.
His main tutors at that time were Victor Pasmore - an abstract Constructionist artist - and Richard Hamilton - a Pop painter. Thinking that he could respond to Pasmore’s wood and plastic reliefs in an amusing way, Walker devised a sculpture from wooden beams and plywood cut outs that hung on a wall but with parts that were like flaps roughly resembling a female vagina and a curved part that was hinged so that it could swing from side to side like an erect penis. The plywood surfaces were painted with pastel colours such as pink and mauve.
The work (since lost or destroyed) responded to the vogue for kinetic art - art with moving parts - and art capable of change (a mature student at Newcastle - Roy Ascott - was making ‘change paintings’ at the time) and the desire for audience participation. (Members of the public could alter the position of the moving parts.) Walker entitled this sculpture ‘Lady Chatterley and Mellors’ to reference the chief characters of D. H. Lawrence’s famous erotic novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover that was being published in paperback by Penguin. (Walker already owned a copy he had smuggled in from Paris.) In 1960 this book was prosecuted in the English courts on the grounds of obscenity. It was cleared by the jury and this event could be interpreted as the beginning of the sexual liberation movement associated with the 1960s.
Pasmore must have liked the sculpture because he included it in an exhibition held in the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle alongside his own more austere, puritanical constructions.
A second hinged plywood sculpture that was oval in shape presented the vagina flaps without a phallus. See the sculpture second from the right in the photo below. Again the pigments added were pastel in hue.
A third hinged sculpture that resembled a phallus was cut out from a piece of blockboard and then painted a reddish purple It was entitled ‘Wooden Obstacle’ (1960, lost or destroyed).
A more ambitious wall mounted sculpture entitled ‘Codpiece’ (1961, revised version 1963, lost or destroyed) consisted of a smooth form made from fibreglass and coloured aluminium in order to resemble the shiny metal of a car’s hood. Beneath this form hung a long lozenge shape made from wood with a metal edging and covered with a sticky Fablon material with a marble design. (The aim was to produce an object typical of jewellery.) It was suspended so that it could swing fromside to side and spin around. Obviously, this work was inspired by the codpieces that historical figures such as Henry VIII used to cover (and highlight) and protect their private parts .
Lavatory handles are often shaped like a phallus especially if one turns them into a vertical position. This ‘Lavatory handle’ (lost or destroyed) was greatly enlarged and made from wood and plaster and then covered with green Fablon. The effect of light in the photo makes it seem like a sculpture by Brancusi.
The Pop artist Richard Hamilton was keen to impart to students his knowledge and appreciation of the art of Marcel Duchamp and their joint influence was reflected in such habits as employing popular culture materials such as motor cycle parts and objects such as a red plastic bread cover bought from Woolworth’s. A wall sculpture with erotic overtones made from such readymade objects was constructed in 1960 (since lost and destroyed).
A Catholic priest who viewed these works dismissed them as ‘fetish’ or ‘cult’ objects found in non-Christian tribal societies. Walker was quite pleased with this characterisation. The flexibility of motor cycle metal tubing encouraged audience participation because the tubing could be twisted into different configurations that would then remain. For reasons lost in the mists of time, the work illustrated below was entitled ‘Letter 21 to Bernard’ (1962, since lost or destroyed).
In 1962, in London, the phallic quality of such tubing resulted in a small number of wall sculptures one of which had the image of an eye collaged to its end.
‘One man and his balls’ (1962, lost or destroyed) was a wall sculpture with moving parts that featured a self-portrait face of Walker at one end of a beam and, at the other end, his genitals; both were painted aluminium and both could be spun around. Furthermore, the sculpture as a whole revolved around a central fixingpoint and could be spun at speed. This work illustrated the common human experience that sometimes the rational mind is in the ascendant and sometimes the sex drive.
Art works, art criticism and art historical research produced in subsequent decades are discussed in the books and articles listed in the publications section.