Art in the field
A childhood immersed in the countryside and Victorian illustration inspired Jonathan Walker’s work, as he explains to Janet Menzies
WHAT better place could there be to live than in the world of Jonathan Walker’s English countryside? Hares leap about the place dressed as Regency toffs in Tattersall check britches and cut-away coats. A fox quaffs from his hip flask as he rides by on his nice middleweight hunter. A badger still in his nightshirt settles down on a cast-iron loo.
Walker says that as a boy growing up in Leek in the Peak District, he inhabited this world. “It is magical, magical; it is the place of true wonder in the natural world. I lived next door to a real countryman and I used to go after school and spend time with him, and he had an old school collection of stuff that would be frowned on now – it was amazing – and we would go out together and be immersed in the wildlife. There are hidden worlds that I was able to see through the eyes of a real countryman. They spend their lives in that world. It is such an intimate knowledge and being there opens your eyes. I just try to reproduce it.”
Walker’s other home from home at the time was the Leek Library/nicholson Institute, where he enjoyed the golden age of late Victorian and early 20th century children’s book illustration and found the inspiration to start painting his secret world of wild creatures. He remembers: “I spent my childhood looking at amazing books with wonderful illustrations. I loved Arthur Rackham, who illustrated Wind in the Willows as well as the fairy tales. And there was Heath Robinson and, of course, Ernest Shepard as well. Gustave Doré – I loved his stuff. They entranced me. It was the world these artists created through the quality of their drawing and their line.”
Walker never lost this instinctive empathy, though he finds it hard to explain it today. “I don’t know how it came about. I had an inner world of imagination and I had grown up with the characters in my head. I painted them and started to sell them years ago in my late teens.”
Now living on Exmoor, he says: “I am surrounded by hunting and it is part of what I see around me here. I associate huntsmen as being foxes, and vice versa, it is the same thing. We spot the animal in the human. Animals are part of us, we associate ourselves with types of animals and recognise that we are deeply connected.”
It is this understanding of both the foxiness or hareness in a human as well as human-like qualities of the animal that lifts Walker’s work above whimsy. Like Beatrix Potter, his animals are closely watched and accurately drawn. “She was a brilliant observer and naturalist. I can do a sweet mouse or an amusing hedgehog but I try not to be sentimental. Showing animals as Potter did is a pervasive theme, as much today as ever. It is more than just a way of teaching young children. Some people don’t get it but there are other people who do live in this world and understand what is going on.”
So why are we so beguiled by the image of a hare playing the fiddle or a fox out rough shooting? Walker’s art lives in the place where anthropomorphism and zoomorphism meet. When the mind’s eye dresses up an animal to look like a human, it also shows us something about ourselves and our relationship with the life around us. Walker puts it graphically: “My foxes are always male and they are always a bit shifty, but charismatic. And with hares there is a wildness and flamboyance – they are fashion icons and bohemian. I love that Regency look, I love dressing hares up. Badgers capture a common humanity, shabbily dressed and the kids are running amok. We can access our own feelings about our own humanity when we look at these animals.
“Like all artists, we are trying to use our painting, our line, to articulate something. It always comes back to this, to these worlds. I want to evoke atmosphere and a sense that it is actually real. Following so many great illustrators, in some ways I don’t feel original but I am doing it my way. My inner world is unique.” There is a magical world out there; you only have to see it.
Jonathan Walker is exhibiting at Churchgate Gallery, Porlock, Somerset (churchgategallery.co.uk) until 22 November. His recent volume of work, As Darkness Falls, £29.95, is available from the gallery. He is a featured artist for December and January at The John Noott Gallery, Broadway, Worcestershire (johnnoott.com) and his work can be seen at Sally Mitchell Fine Arts (sallymitchell.com) and at Gladwell & Patterson, London (gladwellpatterson.com)
We associate ourselves with types of animals and recognise that we are deeply connected