memories of paintings of Maine are largely defined by the work of Winslow Homer

in the 19th century and the Wyeth clan in the 20th, the art of John Walker is

bound to come as something of a shock. Everything traditionally associated with

the beloved imagery of the Maine coast and its weather-beaten landscape-the

illustrational clarity, the crystalline light and the abundant detail of a

down-home naturalism-is totally absent from Mr. Walker's paintings. Inducements

to nostalgia are nil.

What one encounters instead in the artist's latest exhibition- John Walker: A Winter in Maine, 2003-2004 ,

at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport, Me.-are huge, sprawling

expressionist canvases and smaller oil sketches on paper that give the observer

what's best described as the clamdigger's view of the Maine landscape. In this

view, the terrain tends to be muddy, the atmosphere overcast, the sky a distant

band of mottled light, and the boundaries separating land from sea all but

overwhelmed by a painterly virtuosity that's easily mistaken for outright

abstraction. Yet as the eye habituates itself to these bold, highly charged

depictions, what comes into focus are some of the most extraordinary landscape

paintings of the modern era. Not since John Marin burst upon the American art

scene in the 1920's and 30's have paintings of Maine succeeded to a comparable

degree in setting a new standard for pictorial innovation in the art world at

large.

Like many Maine painters, Mr. Walker is, as Mainers say, "from

away"-in his case, originally from Britain; he was born in Birmingham in 1939 and

studied at the Birmingham College of Art in the 1950's. Then came Paris, where

he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in the 1960's, and New York, where he came under the sway

of the regnant Abstract Expressionists.

Nowadays Mr. Walker divides his working life between a coastal property in

South Bristol, Me., the mise en scène

of his current work, and Boston University, where he's a member of the art

faculty. (He often brings his students to Maine as part of their course of

instruction.) In New York, his work can often be seen at Knoedler & Company.

It's sometimes said of the Abstract Expressionist painters that

they could be divided into two classes: those who put everything-which is to

say, more than merely enough-into their pictures, and those who left out as

much as possible while still giving us something to look at in what remained.

Mr. Walker unquestionably belongs to the first category, for his appetite for

overloading his canvases is unstinting, and he has found in the dour

attractions of a muddy bay in South Bristol a correlative in nature that allows

him to create a landscape art in a medium that is not only reminiscent of the

viscous facture often seen in the work of the Abstract Expressionists, but at

times actually incorporates mud itself-or what's sometimes called "sea cake" in

the titles of his paintings-into the painted surface. What Mr. Walker's "sea

cake" paintings recall for me are the lines from the "Little Gidding" section

of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets : "Dead

water and dead sand / Contending for the upper hand."

For Mr. Walker, mud has clearly acquired an aesthetic, if not

indeed a mystical significance. In a recent interview, Bruce Brown, one of the

curators of the current exhibition, asked him, "Technically, how do you get the

mud to stick to the canvas and why do it?" This was Mr. Walker's response:

"I've experimented with mixing various mediums with the mud. Basically dirt

turns into cement, really. The fact that I take in these beautiful

surroundings-the muddiest, smelliest, dirtiest cove to paint in-allows me to

get beyond the beauty of the tourist sort of Maine. Mud has been a reoccurring

theme in my paintings for years …. I have certainly always thought of paint as

being colored mud. As you know, while I was involved with the first group of

landscape paintings, I was concurrently painting my father's recollections of

the First World War where mud was the theme-not only his recollection, but

almost everyone's from that war. I like the fact that mud is dirty. If I'm

painting and a clammer comes along and digs those big, dirty holes right in

front of me, I truly believe that what I'm doing on canvas is just a pastiche.

I really am moved when I see that his is the artwork and mine is just an

impression. It always shocks me that these people come along and dig great

holes and walk away from it and it looks just wonderful."

Well, as I say, this is no longer

the Maine of Winslow Homer and the Wyeths. John

Walker: A Winter in Maine, 2003-2004 remains on view at the Center for Maine

Contemporary Art in Rockport through Aug. 29, and then travels to the

University of Maine Museum of Art in Bangor (Sept. 24, 2004, to Jan. 8, 2005).

For some years now, the British-born Mr. Walker has derived his principal landscape subjects from a closely observed muddy cove on the coast of Maine. The cove encloses an oddly shaped tidal pool, which is not the kind of rocky-coast landscape we associate with paintings of Maine. In Mr. Walker's paintings, the weather is uncertain, and the sky-if visible at all-is reduced to a horizontal band of shadows across the top of a large canvas that otherwise owes much to the painterly conventions of Abstract Expressionism. The light is dusky or moonlit, the tide is low, and the entire scene is firmly resistant to pastoral charm. In the most recent paintings, the horizon line dissolves, and its disappearance sometimes has the effect of nudging the landscape still further in the direction of pure abstraction.

However obscured some of the signs may be, these remain landscapes tethered in their own motif. And for a painter of landscape, Mr. Walker's motif is, you might say, a "hardship" assignment, or would be in other hands. For Mr. Walker, however, it is precisely because of its refusal to lend itself to easy responses and what is called the pathetic fallacy-the attributions of human emotions to objects of nature-that he's drawn to this particular landscape's unexplored mysteries and ambiguities. When a selection of Mr. Walker's earlier paintings of this muddy-cove motif was organized two years ago at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Me., its director, Katy Kline, cautioned that "in attempting a definitive 'reading' of the scene, as in the place itself, one is never on solid footing. The indeterminate ground of the painting deliberately mirrors the uncertain and constantly shifting ground of the actual geography."

This certainly applies to the new paintings as well, and so does Ms. Kline's description of what she calls "The Shape"-that is, the oddly shaped tidal pool that is the most prominent feature of the muddy cove. "It has been interpreted," Ms. Kline writes, "as a wasp-waisted puddle, often reflecting the sky above, whose pinched or swollen edges betray the steady and repeated action of the tides."

Thus, in Clammer's Marks 1 (2003) in the current show, all that we see of a bright blue sky is the shifting light of its reflection in the tidal pool of the muddy cove, and the movement of the loaded brush across the surface of the linen support appears to echo that "steady and repeated action of the tides." In an earlier painting, Clammer's Moon (2002), what Ms. Kline calls "The Shape" captures the pale light of the moon that is clearly visible just above the horizon line at the top of the picture. In Clammer's Marks, North Branch (2003), "The Shape" is again filled with a reflection of blue sky, only here it's accompanied by the hot flashes of what I take to be the last moments of a sunset that illuminates the entire expanse of the cove itself.

Anyone who has ever observed clam-diggers at work in the muddy, low-tide terrain of a summer evening just before dark will recognize the authenticity of the scene that recurs in this Changing Light exhibition. But in these paintings, the diggers have already departed the scene and left only the marks of their labor in the mud, sometimes illuminated by the light of the moon; sometimes even that sign of human intervention is starkly absent.

If you've never lived through the mud season in Maine, it may strike you as odd that a muddy expanse should offer a painter such rich variations of light and color, but this is a common experience at this time of year in Maine, and not only at the seashore. After a heavy spring rain, you are likely to encounter similar reflections in the puddles of dirt roads and backyards and even in the gutters of the city streets where the drainage is poor. Indeed, once you've seen Mr. Walker's paintings of this natural phenomenon, you tend to see the changing light of the mud season wherever you turn; his remarkable series of big, ambitious paintings helps you to understand and appreciate this visual poetry. It's a nice reminder that the art of painting, if sufficiently original and profound in its perceptions of experience, still has the power to change the way we look at the world around us.

Mr. Walker was right, too, to give this exhibition the title Changing Light . Without that clue, I dare say many visitors to this exhibition would mistake his paintings for pure abstraction. But then, of course, nature is itself a copious creator of abstract images, if we have the eye to see them.

John Walker: Changing Light remains on view at Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70th Street, through April 26.

to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban, he presumably renounced the commercial,

capitalistic

impulses that have contributed to the United States' bad

reputation abroad.

But even before the prison

ship U.S.S. Bataan unloads its

notorious cargo in Cuba and the next step of Mr. Walker's fate is decided, the media is working overtime to determine if his

family will turn to good old-fashioned American commercialism-in the form of a

book or film deal-in an attempt to save Mr. Walker's hide.

Since shortly before the New

Year, the publishing and film grapevines have been humming with speculation

that one or both of Mr. Walker's estranged parents were contemplating such

projects, purportedly to pay for any legal defense of their son that they may

need to mount.

But, so far, there has been nothing in the way of concrete

evidence. A spokeswoman for former Assistant U.S. Attorney James Brosnahan, who

has been representing Mr. Walker and his parents, adamantly denied that any

such deals were in the works. "There have been no efforts by the family to sell

book or film rights," said the spokeswoman, who requested anonymity. She did

confirm, however, that "freelance" writers and producers looking for their help

in making the story into a television movie of the week have approached the

family.

Mr. Brosnahan's spokeswoman added that those offers "are not

being considered" by the Walkers.

David Burgin, editor in chief of the San Francisco Examiner , told The Transom, half in jest, that his

staff "makes 400 calls every day to see if there's a deal and who's signed it."

And one prominent New York book scout, who requested anonymity, said: "We've

definitely heard that the story is circulating, but we haven't seen anything

yet."

It's a sticky, conflict-ridden question, one in which the

apparent meatiness of Mr. Walker's story-rap-loving California boy converts to

Islam, joins the Taliban and ends up being captured after fighting against his

native country in one of the most brutal chapters to date of America's war

against Al Qaeda-cannot be judged on its own merits. Rather, it must be

assessed in the context of the thousands of lives lost at ground zero, the

lives of American servicemen and women that have been risked and lost in

Afghanistan, and the current wave of patriotism that has blanketed the country.

The unanswered questions about whether Mr. Walker will be tried

in a criminal or military court, as well as whether his behavior will be deemed

treasonous or merely criminal, also further complicate the matter. Some

states-including New York and California-use "Son of Sam" laws, named after

serial killer David Berkowitz, to prevent criminals from profiting from their crimes.

But Mr. Walker's case is not so clear-cut.

According to many sources in the tightly wound publishing and

film industries, current sentiment dictates that even if the Walkers broke

their silence, they might have a tough time finding any takers.

When, for instance, I.C.M.

literary agent Esther Newberg was asked if she would consider doing business

with Walker family, she replied: "You're talking to the wrong person. 'Cause I

think it's treason. What he did is treason. And thinking that it's treason doesn't

give me any room to work."

Ms. Newberg said she thought Mr. Walker's story "should be

treated the way the Son of Sam was. You shouldn't profit from murdering and

maiming people. I can't imagine a respectable publisher publishing it. I think

he shouldn't profit in any way.  You can

quote me saying this: He shouldn't make one

thin dime ."

Some publishing executives were a little more circumspect.

"Everything about 9/11 was crashed immediately, but this one aspect wasn't,"

said Terry Guerin, a partner at Gotham Scouting Partners. Mr. Guerin said that

how and when Walker's story makes its way to the shelves is an "ongoing

question," but that he hasn't yet heard anything about a proposal. He guessed

that there's been "an intuitive call that this is an unattractive figure, and

that that's what's prevented a wholesale rush to crash a book about him."

Mr. Guerin added, however, that he's sure it's only a matter of

time before such a project materializes, though not necessarily via Mr.

Walker's family. He said it would depend on what turns Mr. Walker's case takes,

and which writer could be matched to the story.

"I couldn't say without seeing a proposal," said Simon &

Schuster head David Rosenthal. Mr. Rosenthal added that he'd "heard the rumors"

about a John Walker book proposal, but had yet to see anything.

Mr. Rosenthal compared the abstract idea of the book to the

manifesto circulated by Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. "I remember when Kaczynski was

trying to sell his book-I saw that, everyone did. I thought it was boring."

The man who didn't think Mr. Kaczynski's story was boring was

Beau Friedlander, founder of Context Books. His imprint was set to publish Mr.

Kaczynski's manifesto before pulling the plug at the last minute because of

"dire, irreconcilable differences of opinion" with the jailed author. Later,

Context published a book by Rhoda Berenson, mother of Lori Berenson, an

American who is still jailed for aiding leftist rebels in Peru.

But though Mr. Friedlander's publishing history has gotten him

labeled a "leftist and reactionary," he said that he wouldn't touch the Walker

story "with a 10-foot pole." He also said that he couldn't see larger trade

houses taking the political chance of telling what looks to be an unsympathetic

story.

Mr. Friedlander said that, in his opinion, the Unabomber's

manifesto was "a historical document," whereas the story of an American kid

from a broken family finding a new-albeit religiously zealous and

violent-family is "a tiny footnote in the annals of history" and "the product

of an overheated news cycle."

"It's not like he's John Brown," laughed Mr. Friedlander. "He's

John Walker."

Literary agent and

conservative pundit Lucianne Goldberg is another one who wouldn't touch a

Walker proposal with "a 10-foot pole." Still, Ms. Goldberg said, if Mr.

Walker's family was so inclined, they probably wouldn't have trouble finding a

publisher.

"Where there's a buck to be

made, there's always a publisher who wants to take it. The race is to the

swift," Ms. Goldberg said. But, she added: "I think a publisher would rather

have a journalist go do this story than people with a vested interest," such as

Mr. Walker's parents. "For them, getting a sympathetic view is always the

motive," Ms. Goldberg added. "Anyway"-and this is a serious problem-"they'd be

hard to promote. A publisher would have a hard time booking the parents on, you

know, The Today Show . They're not

sympathetic people."

Though all of the sources contacted by The Transom denied

interest in publishing or representing Mr. Walker or his family, all were

curious as to why they hadn't seen a proposal yet. Indeed, in a sign that New

York's commercial instincts were once again flowing freely, several called back

and asked to be informed if an agent or lawyer for the project was eventually

tracked down.

The Howard Awards

On Dec. 6, 2001, Our Town ,

the community newspaper of the East Side, published its 31st anniversary issue

devoted to its annual "Our Town Thanks You" awards. Otherwise known as OTTY's,

the awards honor East Siders "who have achieved greatness in the past year."

To achieve such a feat, the self-described "small-town newspaper

in the big city"- where you can "see your neighbor's name in a story about

community opposition to a new tall building"-reached out to its readers and

community leaders and asked them to nominate candidates in 11 categories, from

"Royalty of Retail" to "Community Activists," to determine a "veritable 'who's

who' of New Yorkers."

According to Tom Allon, the paper's publisher and editor in

chief, reporters and editors at the paper and by Mr. Allon himself then

augmented the list of candidates. The names were then sent to a panel of nine

judges led by public-relations executive Howard Rubenstein, who recommended

four of the judges on the panel (Mr. Allon picked the rest).

So some careful readers of Our Town were amused that at least four

of the year's first-prize winners, as well as a number of the runners-up, had

connections to the judges-especially Mr. Rubenstein.

Jack Rudin, for instance, whose Rudin Management is repped by

Howard Rubenstein and Associates, came in first in the "Moguls" category.

Cristyne Lategano Nicholas, whose NYC & Company is also repped by Mr.

Rubenstein's firm, won a first prize in the "Culture Club" category. Indeed,

Ms. Nicholas may have had more than one judge in her corner: Lisa Linden, the

co-chair of NYC & Company's "Crisis Communications Committee," also sat on

the judges' panel.

And Hunter College President Jennifer Raab, whose institution

recently hired the indomitable Mr. Rubenstein to represent it, had the good

fortune to come in first in the "Educators" category. As for Dr. Harold Varmus,

president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the year's "Health Care

Pros" category winner, his own vice president for marketing, Ellen Miller

Sonet, sat on the judges' panel. The list goes on.

Asked about the potential conflicts of interest, Mr. Allon said:

"Howard Rubenstein had absolutely nothing to do with who was nominated for the

awards." He added that Mr. Rubenstein's vote did not count any more than the

votes of the other eight judges on the panel. "We're not going to penalize

somebody just because someone on the panel was linked to their institution,"

Mr. Allon said.

"No one judge had an influence

that went beyond his or her own vote," Mr. Rubenstein said when asked about the

OTTY's. "To me, it wasn't a conflict of interest-I represent so many prominent,

effective, valuable New Yorkers that it doesn't surprise me. I have so many

clients that have done good things for New York." Mr. Rubenstein's authority as

head judge, he said, would go no further than helping to hand out the awards at

the Jan. 10 ceremony at the embattled National Arts Club.

"There's always a potential for conflict of interest in any

competition," Mr. Allon summed up. "But we tried to avoid it as much as

possible."

Gehry's Layover

When Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum director Thomas Krens announced

the opening of the exhibition Frank

Gehry, Architect last spring, he said, "Place two unlikely elements

together and Frank will say, 'Why not?'"

As part of that exhibition, Mr. Gehry was allowed to do an

"architectural intervention" on the Guggenheim's Frank Lloyd Wright building on

Fifth Avenue. After Mr. Gehry and his staff draped aluminum-mesh panels from

the rotunda skylight and installed a "titanium-clad canopy" over a terrace on

the landmark building's façade, Herbert Muschamp, in a review in The New York Times , wrote, "You want the

best? Here it is."

But now, four months after the show closed, Mr. Gehry's titanium

canopy-which looks like a curly scrap off the crumpled-metal Guggenheim Museum

he built in Bilbao, Spain, in 1997-still punctuates the museum's façade. Some

observers are asking why.

With the museum Mr. Gehry

designed for the Guggenheim in lower Manhattan stalled by the events of Sept.

11, the canopy is the only visible link between the architect and the museum in

New York City.

During the first week of January, the Guggenheim requested an

extension on a seven-month temporary permit they had received to install Mr.

Gehry's canopy. Sherida Paulsen, chairwoman of the city's Landmarks

Preservation Commission, said, "We would only allow one temporary extension,

which we generally allow for six months." Anything beyond that would require

another application and a public review for a certificate of appropriateness,

she said.

Guggenheim spokeswoman Betsy Ennis said an additional application

would not be necessary. "It's definitely not permanent. People thought it was

very beautiful and very interesting … so they kept it up a little bit longer."

Still, Ms. Ennis said, "I don't know exactly when it's coming down."

A spokesman at Frank O. Gehry & Associates in Santa Monica,

Calif., said, "That's all in the hands of the Guggenheim. We will support

whatever decision they make. The piece belongs to them."

-Lauren Ramsby

A Cook's Musical Tour

Wearing a black jacket, black shirt, black jeans and black shoes,

Anthony Bourdain, the author of Kitchen

Confidential , walked into Siberia on West 40th and Ninth. A good hundred

friends and associates were waiting for him to celebrate the publication of his

latest book, A Cook's Tour: In Search of

the Perfect Meal , a chronicle of nine months of traveling and adventurous

eating (undercooked iguana tamales in Mexico, sheep's testicles in Morocco, the

poisonous puffer fish in Japan, a still-beating cobra's heart in Vietnam).

There's also an accompanying TV series on the Food Network, which debuted the

next day, Jan. 8.

"Do we have the Dead Boys on the jukebox?" he asked the bar's

owner and his "spiritual mentor," Tracy Westmoreland, who at his request had

reloaded it with more punk rock, Velvet Underground and the Super Fly soundtrack.

"My musical taste stopped in 1985," explained the 45-year-old

writer, who's been called the Lou Reed and Hunter Thompson of the food world.

"The most tragic moment of my life was a) the day Joey Ramone

died, and b) finding out he was listening to U2 when he did. It's like finding

out the Rosenbergs really were guilty-and," Mr. Bourdain added, "they were."

These were harsh words, but Mr. Ramone was once part of Mr.

Bourdain's pantheon. "You know, there have been five touchstones in my life,

and seeing the Ramones the first time was one of them," Mr. Bourdain said.

-George Gurley

He joined a foreign army–and perhaps an international-terrorist subset of that army–that initiated hostilities against the United States, including the murder of thousands of innocent civilians. He participated in armed violence against American allies in Afghanistan. Before his ultimate surrender, he took part in a prison uprising against those allies, which resulted in the horrible killing of an American intelligence agent.

Mr. Walker is therefore a traitor who deserves the same fate as Timothy McVeigh or worse, isn't he? The only questions remaining are what kind of legal formalities should precede his execution, and whether that satisfying conclusion to the Walker story ought to be televised, perhaps with Bill O'Reilly or some other cable gasbag as master of ceremonies.

So much for those quaint, old-fashioned American notions about the presumption of innocence–now junked, amid wartime hysteria and patriotic posturing, along with other antique provisions of the Constitution. When the Attorney General questions the loyalty of anyone who dissents against his actions, who will dare to stand up for the rights of a turncoat caught in the ranks of the Taliban?

It is easy to condemn any young American who turns against his country, as Mr. Walker evidently did, and even easier to condemn his decision to join the Taliban in oppressing their own people. In doing so, he may well have committed crimes against both the United States and Afghanistan.

Yet there are still many questions left unanswered concerning Mr. Walker, beginning with the still mysterious circumstances under which he came to join the Taliban militia and ending with his exact role in the prison riot that led to C.I.A. operative Johnny (Mike) Spann's death. What did Mr. Walker know about the events of Sept. 11 before his capture? When did he learn that the United States was effectively at war with his Afghan and Arab hosts? What would have happened to him if he had tried to leave? What were his intentions and his mental condition?

None of the reporting so far offers the basis for any fair conclusions–and in any case, he is entitled to a process more rational, orderly and unbiased than trial by sound bite.

The lynch-mob mood surrounding the discussion of Mr. Walker's fate shows how casually the concept of constitutional rights can be abandoned, even in a country where those ideas have developed for more than two centuries. More than a few people who should know better–who do know better–have leaped to denounce the "American Taliban" as if he had not only been indicted but tried and convicted.

Restraint is not to be expected, of course, from the New York Post , which instantly placed Mr. Walker in the headline category of "traitor" and "rat." The tabloid's star columnist has urged authorities to "put him before a military tribunal, get him up against the wall and drill him like a sieve." This is gin-mill justice, as understood by the flag-flapping foreign recruits of the Murdoch organization.

Nor is it shocking that Trent Lott, the Senate Minority Leader, would inflame mob emotion in the style of his friends at the Council of Conservative Citizens. While admitting on Fox News Sunday that he doesn't know "all the facts," the Senate Minority Leader called Mr. Walker "treacherous and treasonous" and said he "obviously is guilty of some really horrible things. He should be tried and at the very minimum, I believe, should be sentenced to jail." Nobody bothered to ask Mr. Lott what the purpose of the trial would be, since he is ready to send the man to jail or possibly the death chamber.

It was more troubling to hear similar pandering from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, a person who has herself been subjected to the American media's version of summary justice. "I certainly consider him to have been a traitor to our country," she said on Meet the Press , adding that she didn't mean to suggest what kind of "legal action should be taken." She might instead have followed the better example of Republicans like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who wisely withheld judgment, or her Senate colleague Chuck Hagel of Nebraska.

It was Mr. Hagel, a decorated Vietnam veteran, who listened to Mr. Lott's remarks and then had the courage to say what needs to be said about John Walker: "No question he was in the wrong place at the wrong time, with the wrong people. And why he was there, the motive behind that, we need to let that play out. We need to talk with him, as we are talking to him. I'm not one who is going to immediately charge him with treason …. I think we need to be a little careful here."

currently the subject of a compelling exhibition at Knoedler & Company, now

teaches at Boston University and has lately been painting in Maine. He is,

among much else, an Expressionist with an appetite for big, elegiac subjects.

He is also an Abstractionist with a yearning for the resources of

representation. He has clearly forsaken pure abstraction as inadequate to his

pictorial purposes; yet even as it embraces certain elements of representation,

his painting nonetheless remains steadfast in its loyalty to the aesthetics of

abstraction.

This is a more common conundrum among modernist painters of

Mr. Walker's generation (he was born in 1939) than you might suppose, and one

of the reasons that Mr. Walker commands attention at the moment is his refusal

to disguise the divided character of his artistic ambitions. Another reason is,

of course, the authority he brings to the painterly medium.

However one chooses to characterize this ambition, Mr. Walker's

is clearly a talent haunted by history: both the distant and recent history of

painting itself, and his family history-especially his father's horrific

experience in the trenches during the First World War. All of this places a

very heavy burden on Mr. Walker's painting, and the wonder is not that he

doesn't always succeed in bringing these disparate impulses into perfect

harmony with each other, but that he manages to make so much of their

inevitable collision.

Coherence is not to be expected from this collision of

interests and loyalties, and there is no use in pretending that the current

exhibition at Knoedler's, which is called John

Walker: Time and Tides , doesn't give us a kind of split-screen account of

the artist's governing aspirations. Subjects drawn from nature-in this case,

the landscape of the Maine coast-tend to be treated with a turbulence almost as

dour as those that evoke the violence of war, while the subject of war is

treated more allusively by recourse to the words of poets who have written

about it.

In the most ambitious of Mr. Walker's war elegies, large

areas of the canvas are covered with words from the most famous English poets

of the First World War-Wilfred Owen and David Jones-and from a more recent

poem, Rosanna Warren's Mud (for John

Walker) (1997), written in direct response to Mr. Walker's paintings. All

of these poetic words are inscribed in neat rows on the picture surface by the

painter, using a loaded brush, against (in some cases) a background grid of

what looks to be a chain-link fence. The words in this painterly script aren't

always easily legible, but that is less important than the fact that they are

in any case less horrific than the macabre figures of a man with a sheep's

skull for a head-Mr. Walker's symbolic representation of his father as a

casualty of the carnage of war.

What is one to make of this problematic practice of using

words-or rather, writing, and lots of it-as a substitute or embellishment of

pictorial form? Opinions will naturally differ on this question, but I have to

confess to an aversion to paintings that press a great many words into serving

as pictorial images. This practice strikes me as a conflation or confusion of

genres that invites us to participate in emotions for which the painter has clearly

failed to find a specific pictorial correlative. Poems that read well, that

really engage our minds and emotions on the printed page, become something else

when turned into brush marks on an oversize canvas. Writ large on the painted

surface, they hector, they sermonize, they substitute a literary message for a

medium that is fundamentally-and gloriously!-wordless. They are a confirmation

that there are certain catastrophes in modern experience for which modernist

painting has not yet found an adequate means of expression.

The Maine landscapes in Mr. Walker's current exhibition are

something else entirely. They are certainly the best paintings by Mr. Walker I

have seen. They also bear no resemblance to any other paintings of the Maine

sea coast, a subject that has certainly inspired a good many masterworks in the

past, especially in the art of John Marin and Marsden Hartley, but also a good

deal of pictorial kitsch. Mr. Walker approaches this overused subject as an

outsider, and with a determination to avoid the picturesque. This is Maine in

what is called the mud season, when the earth and the sea drain the fugitive

light of its clarity and sparkle, and nature itself can seem to be unforgiving

and unrenewable.

In my view, anyway, the paradox of this Time and Tides exhibition is that Mr. Walker is far more successful

in striking a tragic note in these landscape paintings than in the war elegies

that are so deliberately designed to elicit a sense of human tragedy. In his

essay for the catalog of the exhibition, Jack Flam speaks of Mr. Walker's

"images of war," but what really dominates the war paintings are images of

words about war, and this has the effect of placing the subject of war itself

at a certain distance from our experience of painting. It is in his "images of

nature" that Mr. Walker succeeds in reminding us of what painting can achieve

in expressing the gravest emotions. Does this suggest that the artist has now

irrevocably abandoned the ambiguities of abstraction for the kind of

representation that has haunted his painting for some years now? Probably not.

A refusal to choose between abstraction and representation seems to be the

keynote of his work just now. But it will be interesting to see where his

attachment to the Maine sea coast takes him in the future. Meanwhile, these

landscapes of Maine instantly take their place in the great tradition of

northern romantic landscape painting.

John Walker: Time and

Tides remains on view at Knoedler & Company, 19 East 70th Street,

through March 3.