“This is not about the truth of materials but of materials imbued with mystery.”¹
– Susan Rosenberg
“When asked about his refusal to assign his works to particular years, [Walton] explains that it is not a strategy to mystify but, rather, a form of honesty.”²
– Richard Torchia
There are two ideas, encapsulated by Rosenberg and Torchia’s quotes, that sit in welcome tension within the work of American artist Bill Walton: mystery and honesty. The exhibition at Studio Voltaire in London, which this essay accompanies marks the first institutional solo exhibition of Walton’s work in over ten years and his first outside of the US. It comprises just ten of Walton’s small, concentrated wall-based sculptures brought together through conversation with the artist’s estate in Philadelphia and a private collection in London. Rather than offering an exhaustive view of his practice, this exhibition – and subsequently this text – offers, like the splinter of silver that runs through Evening Creek #7 (undated), a sliver of Walton’s decades of practice. It provides insight into his material interests, conceptual approaches and formal decision-making while leaving much still to be discovered; a fitting starting point for reflections on the legacy of an artist who enjoyed the interplay between the known and the unknown.
Walton, the son of a lithographer, was a commercial printer by trade. Interested more in the materials he used in the printing process, such as wood, lead and steel, than the finished product, he began making sculptures. His works often involved simple gestures like folding, cutting and stacking, which he assembled by hand using the techniques he learned from his day job. The material language of printing runs through his pieces. In Plywood Series (Blue Corner), (undated), two small rectangular pieces of plywood, each coated on one side with a slick of ice-blue paint, appear like letterpress blocks affixed to the wall. While the exhibition at Studio Voltaire focuses on Walton’s wall-based sculptures, he also maintained a printmaking practice that persisted throughout his lifetime.
Self-taught, Walton was inspired to begin making sculpture after seeing an exhibition of new sculpture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the late 1960s. He had his first exhibition, titled simply William Walton, in 1971 at Dianne Vanderlip Gallery in Philadelphia. Over time, he became an active and valued member of his local artistic community and taught printmaking at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia for nearly two decades. After his death in 2010, the gallery at Drexel University, where he also briefly taught, hosted Artist to Artist, an exhibition of works Walton had either given to or traded with artists in the community. Whilst detailing the local economies via which he preferred to share his art following his disenchantment with the commercial art market, the exhibition primarily underscored his far-reaching generosity and importance to his peers.
It is evident from Walton’s biography, as well as in the sparse form of his assemblages that he was practicing contemporaneous to, and in conversation with, Minimalism. This movement, which was at its height in the 1960s, is often distilled through Frank Stella’s famous remark, “What you see is what you see.” Emerging from discontent with Abstract Expressionism, a style characterised by expressive mark-making and a pursuit of the sublime, Minimalism was broadly concerned with the intrinsic qualities of materials, the removal of narrative, and an engagement with the physical space around an artwork. Ideas from this period, such as Donald Judd’s “specific objects” which aimed to draw together the language of both painting and sculpture, are echoed in Walton’s use of painterly materials and processes. In Three Fold, (undated), he used a piece of linen and the simple process of folding to create a voluminous form which he later coated in multiple shades and layers of brown paint. All of Walton’s works disclose his interest in craftsmanship, technique and construction. His focus on detail even included the metal pins that fix his sculptures onto walls, which he made himself. The backs of the wall-based works shown in this exhibition are as carefully tended as their facades, each diligently annotated with titles and hanging instructions. Like his Minimalist peers, Walton approached his materials with precision and an awareness of their immanent qualities; the heavily textured grain of a piece of wood, the way light bounces off the surface of copper but sits quietly on paper.
On close looking, the Minimalist simplicity of Walton’s sculptures eventually gives way to something more mischievous and that breaks away from the movement’s orthodoxies. Where other sculptors at the time were concerned with monumentality and large-scale construction, his output was decisively, almost stubbornly, small. This made his work inexpensive to make and convenient to store but also precise and easily shared or traded with his friends. Key figures from the time like Judd, often characterised the central concerns of their practice through the material reality of a piece, eschewing illusion or metaphor. Walton’s practice, while also rooted in the qualities of materials, also regularly drew from his friendships, favourite places and day to day experiences, psychologically charging his works and imbuing them with affection, memory and longing.
Nature and the local landscape often provided inspiration. Dark Hill, Evening Creek and Iron Creek, (all undated) recall the local folk names of places that Walton frequented, often on fishing trips, a treasured, contemplative pastime. Each of these works combines the materials of craftsmanship and artistry – silver, glass, oil paint – with the rough, sometimes untreated, surfaces of wood and iron. Dark Hill, (undated), with its playful material combinations, can be read like a conventional landscape painting; a horizon line of wood, paint, black glass and iron that evokes land, water and sky. The water emerges from a simple stroke of blue-green paint that intervenes on a chunk of wood and the reflection of light on the surface of the glass. In Walton’s work, interventions that obscure surfaces are used to bring further awareness to a sculpture’s materiality. A lick of paint isn’t used to conceal but to draw attention to what goes unseen underneath.
Walton’s sentimentality is a distinctive feature of his practice and unfolds across his sculptures. He viewed many of his assemblages as portraits of friends, often using titles to highlight the connections between his works and people he knew. The sculptures in his Sweet Lou and Marie series (all undated) for example, were created as portraits of the couple who owned his local diner. Sweet Lou & Marie #8 comprises a scrunched piece of fabric, likely a dishcloth, that appears completely soaked in grey paint, its delicate creases hardened in place as the paint dried. Walton then fixed it to a piece of wood painted with dapples of brown paint that provide an unexpected, almost uncanny, quality to its surface. Sweet Lou & Marie #9 features a folded (rather than scrunched) napkin in which each fold is painted a slightly different shade of pale grey and fixed on another piece of daintily thin, painted wood. Both works contain layers upon layers of process, thought and, as becomes evident when looking at their delicately considered surfaces, emotion. While using materials commonly found in a diner, how Walton’s interventions capture the two people they are said to depict remains somewhat mysterious to us, the viewers. Yet there is a palpable tenderness and sweetness in the works that one can imagine speaks directly to the friendship between Walton, Lou and Marie.
Like his titles, Walton’s approach to dating his sculptures was also deeply considered. In most cases, his works remain undated, reflecting his open-ended and unprecious approach to his work ever being ‘finished’. Instead, forms would often be altered and combinations had the potential to be reconfigured at any moment. As the quote from Richard Torchia at the beginning of this essay suggests, Walton considered not dating his work as a “form of honesty,” one which foregrounds the way he viewed his materials. Torchia went on to recall that Walton had told him that some works
“…[had] been made with timber removed from a house built with wood cut from
a tree still growing when the Magna Carta was signed.” For Walton, dating his
work would have erroneously suggested that the materials only came to be in the moment of their use within an artwork. His decision not to date his work acknowledges the otherwise hidden life of his materials both before and beyond
their use in his sculptures. It also draws their rarefied status as artworks and the role of the artist as author into sharp, critical focus. As an alternative to these economies of artistic value, Walton offers his works as brief, intimate moments within a much more vast and ultimately profound temporality.
Each of Walton’s alchemical sculptures – whether a piece of seemingly unremarkable wood spliced with a glint of silver or a piece of fabric that appears soft and malleable but is rigidly fixed – reminds us of our continually shifting encounters with truth and illusion. Inspired by commonplace materials and simple gestures, Walton pursued the intensely intimate, the unknown and the sublime in the everyday. By tending to both the real and the endlessly mysterious, Walton reminds us that pleasure can still be found in the play between what we know and experience, and what remains wondrously out of reach.
Amy Jones is Curator (Exhibitions) at Studio Voltaire.
Endnotes:
- Richard Torchia, Christopher Youngs, Susan Rosenberg, Judith Tannenbaum, Eileen Neff, and Patrick Murphy, Bill Walton (Glenside, PA: Arcadia University Art Gallery, 2006), 33.
- Torchia et al., Bill Walton, 12
