This is the dog days of the art world. August is the cruelest of months. I’m on vacation until September… I don’t know, that is sort of the underlying feeling I have been getting when I check in with people recently. But I don’t know if you remember that I tapped into Night Gallery’s exquisite summer group show, and across the Atlantic, in Edinburgh, Ingleby Gallery has Songs of Innocence and Experience, Part II, a showcase celebrating the centenary of the Caribbean artist Frank Walter (1926-2009), but also a deeply moving showing of works that delve into nature. Ingleby first showed Walter’s work in 2013, in Songs of Innocence and Experience, but this reflection of Walter’s work brings together a collection of contemporary artists who are responding to the breadth of his career.
Walter, over roughly five decades he produced an enormous, wildly varied body of work—estimates run into the tens of thousands of pieces—including small-scale oil paintings (often on found materials like wood scraps, Polaroid film canisters, and cardboard), drawings, sculpture, and an extensive, sprawling autobiography and other writings. His paintings ranged from lush Caribbean landscapes and seascapes to portraits, abstract and cosmological imagery, and depictions of his imagined royal lineage. To many, Walter is considered one of the great "outsider artists” of his generation, and though that label has been often overused in our contemporary vernacular, my research of Walter definitely gives him the title appropriately. He trained in agricultural science and worked for years managing sugar estates, including a period in Europe, before an incident (he reportedly refused to work under a white supervisor at a company post) led him to withdraw from conventional society. He spent much of his later life living in relative isolation in the hills of Antigua, in a small stone hut without electricity, generating his own power to run a computer he used for his writing. And painting. There’s a great write-up at The Outsider Art Fair.
So is this show about the spirit of the man or a true reflection of the work? It’s a bit of both. The work captures the landscape, the sort of dreamy and distant vantage point that Walter seemed to be painting from, but also just the way in which Walter seemed to drench himself in a topic. He was about texture and sight, about the dedication of place. The artists here not only capture that spirit, but has all spent their careers in the same vein, chasing the ever-evolving landscapes around them. —Evan Pricco
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