Emma Walker

ABOUT THE ARTIST   |   VIEW SELECT AVAILABLE WORKS

"Still in her mid-30s, Emma Walker is already one of Australia’s most convincing and original painters. Her work is as audacious as it is poetic; the one quality leavens the other, so that just as delicate reverie sets in, you’re pulled up by a less immediately seductive note, an act of painterly boldness or some other form of tough, enlivening aesthetic decision.

Walker’s work gets stronger with the years, treading the sometimes overtrodden path between representation and abstraction in a way quite unlike any of her contemporaries. She orchestrates her constantly returned-to motifs – seas, inlets, rivers, headlands, skies, clouds and shadow – in ways that are constantly invigorating.

The emotions and moods of her works are conjured directly out of the processes of painting, unmediated by theory or jargon. And yet these are intelligent paintings – intelligent in their understanding of ambiguities, of space, and of colour. They are extremely sensitive to mood, at times reminiscent of the work of the American Luminists – especially Martin Johnson Heade’s atmospheric subtlety and bold use of pooling blacks in paintings such as Approaching Thunder Storm, 1859, and Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay, 1868. But Walker updates the idiom with her bold and brushy way with paint and her tremendous array of textural effects.

Her works on paper are also compelling, suggesting new possibilities of texture and scale, playing deftly with poetic links between the microscopic in nature and the distantly observed'.

- Sebastian Smee

BIOGRAPHY
Born 1969 Sydney, Australia
   
Studies, work and travel
2004-05 UK, Austria, Netherlands
2003 Indonesia
2000 B.A. (Visual Art), National Art School, Sydney
1999 France, Italy, Holland, England, Honduras, India
1998 India
1995-96 USA, Cuba, Honduras, Belize
1995 Residency, Hill End, NSW
1994 Printers assistant, Whaling Road Studios, Sydney
Worked on series of etchings with Arthur Boyd
1993 India and Arnhem Land
1992-94 Diploma Fine Arts, National Art School, Sydney
New Zealand
1990-91 Studied life drawing, Acadamia di Belle Arte
1987-89 Lived in Jakarta and Bali
1986-87 USA, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, France
Lived In Rome
 
Solo Exhibitions
2006 New paintings, king street gallery on burton sydney
2002 Floating world, king street gallery on burton
2000 From little things, big things grow, king street gallery on burton
1999 Tidal fragments, broken bay, king street gallery, Sydney
1997 Somewhere to fly, king street gallery
1991 Pod Gallery, Sydney
   
Selected Group Exhibitions
2008  2 x 2 Group Exhibition, Tim Olsen Gallery Annex, Sydney
2006 Local Art, Lismore Regional Gallery at the Byron Bay Writers Festival
2005 Oceans 11, Lismore Regional Gallery, Lismore, NSW
Last show of the year, King Street Gallery,Sydney
2003 Country energy art prize, New England Regional gallery, NSW
330 show, king street gallery on burton
2002 king street gallery at Span Galleries, Melbourne
The Border Art Prize, Murwillumbah Regional Art Gallery, NSW
2001 Monochromatic, king street gallery
Bat, Ball and Brush, A Summer of Cricket and Art at the S.C.G, Sydney
2000 Redlands Westpac Exhibition
Women and the landscape, king street gallery on burton
Things of wood, king street gallery
Group show, king street gallery on burton
1999 New 9, Sir Herman Black Gallery, Sydney University, Sydney
last show of the year, king street gallery on burton
1998 Our Collection-The Artists of Hill End, 1947 - 1998, Bathurst Regional Gallery, NSW
last show of the year, king street gallery on burton
gallery artists, king street gallery on burton
1997 Gallery artists, king street gallery on burton
Horizon line, (curated by robert hirschmann), king street gallery, newtown, sydney
1996 Guitar Shaped World, Tamworth Regional Gallery, NSW
Fishers Ghost Prize , Campbelltown Regional Gallery, NSW
1995-96 The Artists of Hill End, Art Gallery of NSW, touring Bathurst; Armidale; Broken Hill ; Ballarat Regional Galleries
1995 Fresh, (with Pamela Cowper), Gallery on Booth, Sydney
Alumni Exhibition, National Art School, Sydney
1994 Dissonance, Woollongong University Art Gallery, NSW
1992 Drawing Show, Pod Gallery
1988 Dua Bersama, Mitra Budaya, Jakarta, Indonesia
1986 Ad in Fine Art Um, Surry Street Gallery, Sydney
 
Collections
Bathurst Regional Gallery
Macquarie Bank
Jackson Smith Solicitors
Sir Herman Black Gallery Collection, Sydney University
Private Collections
 
Selected Bibliography
2007, Lois Randall, Weekend Star, January 20
2006 Alex Warren: Starters, Insideout Magazine April pg.150
Youssef, Sherine: Sydney Serenity, Maddison Magazine, March pg.296
Dee Tipping, Weekend Star, July 8
2002 Lenny Ann Low: Metropolitan, The Sydney Morning Herald, 21-22 December pg.15
Pryor, Lisa: Spotlight, The Sydney Morning Herald, 19 November
1999 Smee, Sebastian: Review, The Galleries, The Sydney Morning Herald, 20 April
1997 Smee, Sebastian: 180 Degrees of Separation, The Sydney Morning Herald, Metro, 20 June
1995, The Artists Of Hill End, In The Picture Exhibition preview
1995, Angela Benniw, Hill End: preserving the painting ground, The Sydney Morning Herald, July 28
1995, Judith White, Art Of The Earth, The Sun Herald, July 30

Emma Walker

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