John G Walker

Born in Birmingham, Walker studied at its College of Art from 1955 to 1960. He won a prize at the John Moore's exhibition in Liverpool in 1965, and was Gregory Fellow in Painting at the University of Leeds from 1967 to 1970. His work has explored and developed the idea of the large shape, given the illusion of three dimensions through dramatic lighting and set against a flat, often sprayed, ground. This tension between flatness and space distinguished his work from much contemporary American modernism, which remained a source of interest. In the early 1970s, his reinterpretation of Cubist collage brought about the cut-out canvas.

Walker has subsequent refered to earlier traditions, including Manet, Goya, and Vel zquez as well as Matisse. He worked in the USA during the 1970s - at the Cooper Union, New York, and Yale University; and was artist in residence at St Catherine's College Oxford from 1977-78. He was appointed Dean of the Victoria College of the Arts in Melbourne in 1982, after a residency in Australia from 1979 to 1980. Elements of Oceanic art have come to play an important role in his work, which continues in the modernist idiom.