"Nature's Walker" by Brian O Doherty

Is there such a thing as art made with a shy eye? An art made through the paradox of the rear view mirror looking back to look ahead? An art engaged in the most discreet smuggling? That seduces nature to oblige its every desire? So that nature itself orginally disguised?

It is this disarming cojugation of faux innocence and steely intentions that may define Sarah Walker's paintings. They conceal their erudition and formal probity with graceful charm. For Ms. Walker quotes some of modernist paintings high points- e.g. the Rothkoesque “ Glenbeg Bog Cut ” , the Pollockian ‘ Winter Trees' – while putting things in reverse. By which I mean that the pure abstraction of these two exemplars, derieved in part from, respectively, bruised skies and, well, winter trees-are ushered back by Ms. Walker to their sources. To all his, add the presence that hovers over everything Ms. Walker does: wit that approaches the epigram.

How do you make an abstract painting lock into a spectator's experience with an almost audible click? Sarah walker knows how, she ‘justifies'. Mayo Digger is a perfect example. A rosy field of short, all-over vertical strokes becomes an actual field when you notice the micro-figure waist-deep in far mid-distance. In Ulli and Claudia, Garnish Point , two childern send echoes of their awed presence into a painted void. Same thing, with a darker , eerier mood, in the wonderful Kieran and Emmet on Portnacloy Strand, Katy Shea's House - tiny blurred doll-house to lower right – does the same, but the mood switches to loneliness and isolation, while leaving you time to revel in pure painting, rehearsing the painter's joy. Which is perhaps why (lacking a justification) Sea Thrift in the Water doesn't escape Monet. What is clear – to me at any rate – is the maturity of this work, so knowledgeable about its artistic sources, so physically in touch with its natural ones.

In touch is literal here. All these paintings are evidence of a life lived close to brambles, trees, country roads, spring and winter air. Ms. Walker art filters nature with a connoisseur's eye, therbey giving it a fine esthetic pedigree. But the closeness to nature is, as I say, quite tactile. For this art is made by fingers that pluck and squeeze and gather fruits and flowers. The most mundane of nature's casual bounty - buttercups, blackberrries, daisies, heather, even turkeys heads – are distributed within the gridded square canvases. The issues of confluence, contact and replusion inherent in all distiribution pieces are handls with savoir faire - concealed of course.

Are the berries and flowers smuggled into pedigreed esthetic preecints? Or is it the other way around ? In an astute comment on Ms. Walker's work, Charles Tyrell refers to a result “that can be quite flirtatious with a humourous underpinning that displays a confidence and an understanding of painting” . In the four-part Bog Cotton that undertanding extends to one of the lower left- good placement- the flowers are gone, but implied. What is left is a sinous – and delectable – linear eassay.

Can someone so nature – bound to her immediate landscape sense the moods and make us share them, of foreign teritories? The painting, India -signs of life in mid-distance between bands of the baked colours of that sub-continent – answers that question, and shows us – me, at any rate- that this much travelled artist mature art is capable of even farther reaches.

Brian O Doherty

October 2005