Laura Elliott
‘‘Final Destinations/Just Beginnings’’, Peter Walker
(Eade Gallery, Clyde)
PETER WALKER is another artist who reaches out and draws the viewer into his work, using a slightly abstracted Expressionist style to set the scene without stripping it of all mystery. His multimedia landscapes are painted with a certain spontaneity, letting the direction of each canvas unfold in the moment, responding to changes in mood and atmosphere. That vividity and dynamism is very apparent in the finished work: you can clearly see the movements of his brush, the speed and energy in some sections, the meditative delicacy in others. Paint is applied in thick, textural dabs, left to drip, brought together in violent collision, stroked on in large sweeps and minuscule flicks.
Walker has a superlative eye for colour — not simply the blending of tones, the perfect balance of complementary shades, but in using colour to harness the transformative qualities of light. A lake becomes a stretch of impenetrable darkness, the eye skating across its surface, drawing away from the cold depths and up to the snowy mountains, glittering under a winter sky. A patch of golden light breaks through grey cloud and sets the world below aglow, creating a small haven of warmth and comfort amidst an otherwise barren land. A consistent feature throughout the collection is the sweep of tumultuous sky, so atmospheric that it seems almost a living presence in the scene, and often noticeably different in style from the terrain below.