#11: 6/12/2022

The Painting is a Sad Song- on the Work of Ben Walker
By Benjamin Terrell

Goodbye goodbye it won't be long till we meet again
2021, oil on linen
14" × 18" (35.56 × 45.72 cm)

Sad songs are brief, ubiquitous out-breaths lamenting the ephemeral nature of this existence. A good sad song is catchy, cathartic and can stay with you, burrowed into your belief structure, for your whole life. Most memorable are often the ones heard in youth, when we don't yet have the words for complex new emotions and are felt as a witness or wing to lift you from life's first darkness. As you age, the relationship you have with your favorite sad songs both changes- from adult insight- and stays the same- from stored memory and youth's buried yearnings. These brief laments become mirrors and mile markers, both confronting our inevitable adult contradictions and occasionally delivering us to places otherwise unreachable. Often our first truths and initial longings of this existence, sad songs (and the events they were inspired by) are as much about us becoming us as they are about "us before us."

Timekeepers
2022, oil on linen,
16" × 16" (40.64 × 40.64 cm)

 If it is true, that we are uninterrupted energy having existed before and capable of continuing past the forms where we now find ourselves, then sad songs and first longings are moments when our mortality is first tested. These often powerless and humble places are where we are made aware of the uniqueness of our expressive abilities as well as the limited capacities of our temporality. In adulthood we reach stages of unlearning, where we refute much of the foundation of our earliest beliefs. This too, is an opportunity and acknowledgement, a helpful echo that reminds us- before we created "ourselves", we were created, and those same authors aligned and coaxed us energetically from elsewhere. This life is a brief vantage point where everything monumental and unnamed admires us in our finite and frail placement. Us, the odd ones out amongst all of the mystery and invisibility. ​

I don't love me anymore
2022, oil on linen,
14" × 18" (35.56 × 45.72 cm)

Sometimes a painting is a sad song. Great paintings have been made from joy, triumph and connectedness. But these are our natural (not human) states, whereas sorrow is uniquely of this form. What makes us human is the ability to feel and store physical and psychological pain. Pain can be egoic and grasping, but clean pain is the birth cry of this existence and the articulation of having and losing, letting go. Paintings expressing sadness are attempts at documenting and describing but also the artist mimicking creation itself, to show creation to creation. Poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote about how to explain this world to something not of or beyond this plane, "Tell (it) about the world, not the indescribable; the universe feels with far greater feeling, you're just a beginner. Show (it) some simple thing, something that's really ours, and lives near our hand."

A landscape small
2021, oil on linen,
​10" × 12" (25.4 × 30 cm)

Rilke writes, "even the groan of sorrow (sometimes) decides to become pure form." Earthly unguarded emotions amaze and impress even the angels as they are expressed ecstatic and transformed from the instrument of our making, be it violin, pen or brush. These hidden places in us are heard and seen when we are able to turn sorrow and praise into a mutual destination. Our early emotional index is our trailhead to wonder because it was forged in a time when what we were prior was equal distance from who we will become. At that time in life, before we were formed by our choices, we have more in common with angels (the unknown) and everything that came before us, than we do with our adult selves or everyone else who will walk with us through our lives.     ​

The columns are all men
2022, oil on linen,
​14" × 18" (35.56 × 45.72 cm)

These first fields and fertile grounds for initial emergence are locations and destinations of the paintings of Kent (England) artist, Ben Walker. The painter paints a landscape that is equal parts interior emotional space and exterior distant world. Walker depicts it with "...the weight and care of great sadness" (paraphrasing Rilke's Elegies) and is always able to imbue a "...sense that what we're striving for.. was once much nearer.. and knew us in ways that were infinitely tender." Using hazy greens, primary blues and oranges applied so thin and soft that paint appears scrubbed into coarse canvas, Walker's world isn't so much out of focus as it is a reminder of our inability to focus on the world (as it is) in front of us. The artist's most recent work is reduced even further into shapes and spare horizons. These newest rural geometries are both forgotten and familiar, they are lush emptying kingdoms devoid of rulers or reign.

Mother
2021, oil on linen,
​14" × 18" (35.56 x 45.72 cm)

Walker's painting "Mother" is a dueling foreground- background flip completed in only four colors and about four shapes. Dusty dark blue forms are trees for a minute, then recede behind a rusty orange that goes from background sky to foreground smoke cloud. The image otherwise reads as conventional space from a green bottom ground and the soft floating circle of the moon. Two muted slightly outlined forms sit closest to us as fellow observers, their outlined shapes echoed by a background blue stack setting up a distant longing. A mother is a moon, in her creativity and intuition, and she forever illuminates our darkest places with even in her palest glow. ​

Playtime (2)
2021, oil on paper

In "Playtime (2)," two young inquisitive figures look out from a framed and centered foreground. A half circle, half square shape holds the interest of the closest figure and keeps us blocked from both. Walker uses basic shapes as building blocks or symbols of our earliest ambiguities, like codes created as children make their first associations. The artist's figures are almost always distant, even when central subjects, but are these the first friends you meet or the last people that will see you off? Perhaps they are the subjects of both sides, like author Annie Dillard describes in For The Time Being: "They look about slowly, moving their eyes. They do not speak as trees do not speak. They do seem wise, as though they understood that this is their new world, however strange, was only another shade in a streaming marvel they had known from the beginning."

A castle strong
2021, oil on linen
14" × 18" (35.56 × 45.72 cm)

In, "A Castle Strong," a crenellated castle wall confines and keeps the viewer removed from a dark kingdom of hills and horizon. The yellow green of the bottom barrier's hue is similar to the top distant sky so that we are pushed to ponder the olive unknown middle. Are we fortified or forested and left alone in nameless darkness? In this landscape both things are true, safety is undermined by the ambiguity of everything we cannot know. In our lives the small walls we construct around ourselves keep out nothing but take a lifetime to build. In Walker's castle, defensive spaces of the wall are few and off center as if to imply, even our best armor is never enough, we are ruins in reverse destined to surrender to this life's overwhelming nameless campaign.

Earlier this year, figures seemed to vacate Walker's work, replaced by long dividing hedges, castle walls and fences.  Maybe fences and other things that divide are ladders left on their side and perhaps the population of Walker's world had temporarily ascended out of the frame. In the book Ladder of Monks, written by a Carthusian monk named Guigo 2, contemplation and meditation are rungs of a ladder that "...rests upon the earth, but its top pierces the clouds and touches heavenly secrets." Perhaps the painter himself now reaches meditative ascension by emptying his stage of its actors, leaving a landscape flat and colored primary like the background of a children's show that sits unlit and unused. Painter Chris Orr has also painted figures similarly lost in a landscape, but where an Orr image is dubious science and the folly of earthly exploration, Walker work is transcendent, doubtful and sincere at the same time even as he strays off his own pathways. Now, when Walker occasionally allows figures back in, he catches them in the misty morning of their first arrival or immediately before an emptying out of their deepest departure.

The animal orchestra
2021, oil on linen
10" × 12" (25.4 × 30.48 cm)

This life isn't a path but a performance. At the bottom of my hill, there is a new bird that sings a nightly song. Its call begins light, loping and circular in sound but between first and second songs it does something unusual. It fills its belly with air and as the bird inhales it makes a throaty inventory of all the notes of the first song performed at once. Like the bellows of an accordion pulled apart, as if the bird must swallow and digest the entire first part of its call to finish the full song. I have read that birds left in a stable environment will perform the same song for thousands of years. Even though we are rarely prepared to hear it, everything in this existence is always singing at its own loudest awe inducing volume. Life is an unfathomable infinite choir and even in our resistance, life plays us like an instrument and is always pleased by the addition of our reply.

The report
2021, oil on linen
14" × 18" (35.56 × 45.72 cm)

coda

"The report"

We catalog and can remember the first feelings of youth because our brain instinctively builds a mausoleum for memories of our childhood. The beginner's brain with its billions of receptors seeks circuits to create a self to connect to and finds them from stimulation of the senses interpreting the outside world. A future ruler's tomb buried with the treasures of our initial impressions and early exposure to everything. And so the sand and self swells and swaggers and thickens a lens that we will use to look out at the world for the rest of our days. The entire time underneath all the shallow knowing and the scrubby tangled roots of our weighted uncertainty is "the report"- our innermost dossier. To find it, one must excavate in equal parts sorrow and rapture and be prepared to sacrifice something serpentine and worldly. Only then are we granted the lyrics to our most intimate song.

You can see more of Ben Walker's work:
- on instagram @benwalkerpainter
- on instagram @one.wall.gallery
​- at www.benwalkerart.co.uk/
- on the Sto Lat Gallery website
​

Above and below: images from Lonely Kings, Ben Walker's solo show at Sto Lat Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.