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2003
Kahn Award
Little cove garners big award for CFA’s John Walker
By Tim Stoddard
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| John Walker Photo by Vernon Doucette |
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When John Walker began painting the tidal pool and mud flats in a cove near his home in Seal Point, Maine, he was reluctant to show his work to friends and colleagues. The CFA professor of visual arts, who had earned an international reputation as one of the leading abstract painters of the 1970s and 1980s, feared that his paintings weren’t serious enough. “After going out into the landscape every day and really enjoying it,” he says, “I’d bring these paintings back and hang them not in my studio but in a separate building, because I didn’t want to have this activity known to the paintings in the studio!”
But in the early 1990s, another painter saw the landscapes and advised Walker to show them. Critics said the paintings were some of his strongest work, and this year, Walker won BU’s annual Kahn Award for a series of landscapes that were painted in that little cove in Maine. Established by the late alumna and benefactress Esther Kahn (SED’55, Hon.’86), the award honors faculty who have completed an imaginative work in literature, the visual arts, music, or criticism and scholarship in the humanities.
Walker won the award in honor of Changing Light, a sequence of paintings meditating on light and space in his Maine tidal landscape. His subject, he says, is “one small piece of a landscape where I feel comfortable. It took me years to assimilate it, to work out what I could paint. I didn’t want to paint what everybody else saw. I didn’t want to paint views. I wanted to see something in a way that was unique. I didn’t know what that would be. And what it turned out to be was this one little cove. I guess it was a place where I could hide.”
The images in Changing Light explore Walker’s emotional response to the area’s ever-changing appearance. “In these sensuous but tough-minded paintings,” says UNI Professor Rosanna Warren, BU’s Emma Ann MacLachlan Metcalf Professor of the Humanities and the chair of the Kahn jury, “Walker pays tribute to the tradition of European painting to which he is heir — Velázquez, Rembrandt, Manet — and in the true spirit of that tradition, renews it with his startling re-envisioning of spatial relations. Out of the mud of the tidal pool, Walker draws many different lights; out of the body of the observed world, he makes the spirit visible. He does this with an astonishing variety of marks, textures, hues, and values. In a way, he has painted his own private Book of Genesis, revealing the elemental mud and dust from which we spring as animated by light and breath.”
Walker says that by the time he began painting the pieces in Changing Light, he had gotten over some of his initial hesitance to exhibit his landscapes. “I certainly wasn’t reluctant about painting and showing these,” he says. “There was just a huge nervousness on my part when I started to commit myself to paint landscapes again. I thought other work I was doing was much more interesting. People knew me for one kind of painting, and here I was turning up with something that was quite different. It was a dramatic right turn, and the art world’s always apprehensive when they don’t know what they’re going to get.”
Walker says the Kahn Award’s $5,000 purse will help fund an upcoming traveling exhibition of his work. An extension of Changing Light, the show will open at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockland later this year and then move to other galleries around the United States.
Born in 1939 in Birmingham, England, Walker attended art school there and in Paris before moving to London in 1963. He has been on the CFA faculty since 1993. His work is collected internationally and has shown at London’s British Museum, the Tate Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum.
CFA’s angel
Esther Kahn, a former BU trustee and longtime patron of the arts in Boston, died on April 30 at her Brookline home. In 1985, a year after the death of her husband, Albert (founder of the Purity Supreme grocery chain), Esther gave the University $1 million to establish the Kahn Career Entry Scholarship Fund for the Arts, the country's first scholarships for students in the performing and visual arts. “In endowing this grant program, her generosity was harnessed to her extraordinary imagination,” said Chancellor John Silber at a May 2 memorial service for Kahn. “In establishing this fund she set a national standard, the first of its kind in the United States and one of the most creative philanthropic initiatives to have benefited education in the arts.” Scholarship recipients such as Geena Davis (CFA’79, Hon.’99) have gone on to distinguished careers in acting, opera, painting, and musical performance.
Born in 1914 in Brookline, the youngest of three girls, Kahn was 16 when she entered Radcliffe College, graduating in 1935. As a high school and college student, her love of the arts sometimes got her into mischief. On Fridays, she would cut classes to attend performances of the Boston Symphony, waiting in the standing-room-only line for a ticket.
As a history and English teacher at Bedford High School in the late 1950s, Kahn did groundbreaking work in the field of sex education. Silber says that Kahn was a Renaissance woman who “was a pioneer in the field of family and sex education before these subjects became generally accepted in the public schools. Her work at Bedford became known throughout the commonwealth, and her counsel was sought by many other school systems.”
John Walker met Kahn only briefly during his tenure at BU, but her support for the University’s aspiring artists left a lasting impression on him. “People like her are on the side of the angels when it comes to the arts,” he says. “And I guess that’s where she is now.”
John Walker was featured in Bostonia magazine’s spring 2003
issue (www.bu.edu/alumni/bostonia/2003/spring/walker/index.html). The
Kahn
Award will be presented to him at the College of Arts and Sciences Class
Day exercises on Saturday, May 17, at 3 p.m., in Morse Auditorium.
14
May 2003
Boston University
Office of University Relations