Lemon Street Gallery

Jason Walker | Sam Hall - 17th September to 18th October 2002

The work below features in our current exhibition Just click on an image for a closer view. We're open monday-saturday, 10:30-5:30. Please pay us a visit

Jason Walker
Boat I
Oil on canvas
76 x 76cm
£ 2100 + VAT

Jason Walker
Boat II
Oil on canvas
26 x 26cm
£ 750 + VAT

JASON WALKER

A child’s toy – a blue and yellow plastic boat – balances precariously on a glass shelf, itself hanging apparently unsupported in front of a loosely suspended white sheet against which plays the network of shadows these objects cast. At first glance it takes some working out just what is going on in Jason Walker’s Boat I, the boat the only truly concrete, opaque object in a painting where everything else is transparent, insubstantial and evanescent throwing the viewer distinctly off-balance both spatially and formally. By definition a still-life, it is nonetheless clearly not a painting simply about appearances, the conscious arrangement of the objects being painted pointing us in the direction of some more associative, contemplative intention for the work, to an older idea of the still-life as relating to the passage of time, change, mortality – it is no accident that the French term for such a subject is nature morte, the Dutch still-leven, that translates as ‘a motionless aspect of nature’. And further back, in Renaissance and Baroque times, the inclusion of still-life motifs played an intrinsic, and highly significant role in the painting’s spiritual, narrative function, the egg of purity/fecundity hanging over Piero della Francesca’s Madonna dell’Uovo, the over-flowing bowl of fruit placed right to the foreground edge of the table in Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, a reminder of earthly corporeality.

It comes as no surprise therefore, to learn that it is to artists like these that Jason Walker is now beginning to turn for inspiration as his paintings start to develop away from the more loosely painted, impressionistic ‘descriptions’ of the flower and still-life paintings that formed the basis of his art when he first started painting seriously six or seven years ago, a style very much in the English tonal and ‘painterly’ painting tradition that goes back through artists like Bernard Dunstan to Sickert and, ultimately, Vuillard and Bonnard. More recently still the meticulously measured and controlled figure and still-life compositions of Euan Uglow have provided him with an example of a tighter, more structured approach to such subject matter. Now, in this new group of work, you sense his impatience with the pictorial and, by implication emotional, rigidity such a way of working can bring with it and that he is now beginning to find his own themes, his own ‘voice’ if you like. Boat I for example, developed out of the larger composition Hope in which his un-clothed, pregnant wife sits facing us, accompanied on either side by two children’s toys, a large fabric snake and the (same) plastic boat, included here as symbols, presences even, of his two older daughters. It is, in its way, too, as much a still-life with figure as it is a figure with a still-life background, the objects charged with the same intense human feeling as the figure of his wife herself.

This would seem to be very much the direction Walker’s work is now going; Nana, (a work which drew a great deal of critical attention earlier this year at the Hunting Prize shows at the Royal College of Art and Trebah Gardens), with its spray of dead flowers reflected in a mirror, providing a touching and visually complex remembrance of a loved relative, would seem to provide a much more revealing indication of the direction his work now seems to be taking, more so, perhaps, than the large Self –portrait, Postman which created a no less favourable response at last year’s BP National Portrait Gallery Prize. There is certainly a strong body of new work in this exhibition to confirm this suggestion, Plastic Arrangement I, Dress, Still-life with Walnuts among them, all works resonant with an unmistakable tender sense of emotional feeling. Potentially even more remarkable still though are some further works, some ‘in progress’ at the time of visiting his studio (and writing this introduction) in which Walker has taken the idea of constructing his still-lifes to a more extreme, almost artificial degree than ever, making stylised origami toy models of animals (Paper Bull), and birds (Crane and Paper Cranes). Through the complexities of lighting and setting in which he then places these models, compounded in the case of Paper Cranes by the brightly-coloured decorative paper from which they are made, Walker interweaves reality and artifice into subtly poetic visual metaphors for the fragility and tenderness of family relationships.

Nicholas Usherwood, Editor of Galleries and Chairman of the International Art Critics Association, August 2004

Jason Walker
Plastic Arrangement I
Oil on canvas
92 x 61cm
£ 1800 + VAT

Jason Walker
Apple on Stool
Oil on canvas laid on board
26 x 20cm
£ 800 + VAT

Jason Walker
Roses
Oil on canvas
91 x 61cm
£ 1700 + VAT

Jason Walker
Self Portrait (2004)
Oil on card
31 x 26cm
£ 650 + VAT

Jason Walker
Grape Stalk I
Pencil (chocolate) on paper
28 x 18cm
£ 250 + VAT

Jason Walker
Grape Stalk II
Pencil (chocolate) on paper
15 x 13cm
(diptych with Grape Stalk III)
£ 250 + VAT

Jason Walker
Grape Stalk III
Pencil (chocolate) on paper
15 x 13cm
(diptych with Grape Stalk II)
£ 250 + VAT

Jason Walker
Rose Heads
Pencil (chocolate) on paper
17 x 20cm
£ 250 + VAT

Jason Walker
Paper Crane I
Pencil on paper
31 x 20cm
£ 250 + VAT

Jason Walker
Paper Crane II
Pencil on paper
20 x 15cm
£ 225 + VAT

Jason Walker
Dress
Oil on canvas
92 x 51cm
£ 2100 + VAT

Jason Walker
Postman Study
Pencil (chocolate) on paper
15 x 20cm
£ 250 + VAT

Jason Walker
Hope
Oil on Linen
107 x 76cm
£ 3000 + VAT

Jason Walker
Still Life with Paper Poppies
Oil on Board
25 x 25cm
£ 950 + VAT

Jason Walker
Dress Study
Pencil on Paper
31 x 31cm
£ 290 + VAT

Jason Walker
Three Paper Cranes
oil on canvas
66 x 71cm
£ 1000 + VAT

Jason Walker
Blue Cloth with Walnuts and 12 Horse Chestnuts
oil on canvas
76 x 76cm
Price on Application

Jason Walker
Paper Angel
oil on board
25.5 x 20cm
Price on Application

Jason Walker
Paper Bull
oil on canvas
51 x 41cm
£ 1650 + VAT

Jason Walker
Still Life with Walnuts
oil on board
25.5 x 25.5cm
£ 950 + VAT

Jason Walker
Plastic Arrangment II
oil on board
51 x 41cm
Price on Application

Jason Walker
Composition Study I
oil on board
25.5 x 31cm
£ 575 + VAT

Sam Hall
SH1
52 x 56cm
£ 600

Sam Hall
SH2
54 x 56cm
£ 600

Sam Hall

Sam Hall has been making pots for ten years, and over the last five years in particular has been producing a consistent and significant series of identifiable work.

He was born in Shipley, West Yorkshire and studied ceramics at Harrogate and Loughborough colleges. He now lives in St Ives, Cornwall and works in the Gaolyard Studios there set up by the potter John Bedding.

He begins with the simplest of forms, the cylinder. This same hand eye combination has thrown thousands of these cylinder forms and it is precisely this repartition of process that allows the potter this as a starting point, unencumbered as it is now by ornament or artifice either in thought or deed. Distinctions between thought and action, brain and hand dissolve in this repartition where that which is learned through doing is done. Thus the clay is given a structure, this form provides the aesthetic and theoretical context within which all decisions and all other justifications of its use must be made.

Since 1996 there has been little variation in these forms, these basic elements that are to become basic individual objects. The imposition of these limitations allows Hall the intense scrutiny, the study of the forms themselves and their inherent possibilities. This study and its recognition of that the form allows, or possibly demands, leads to the subsequent stage that Hall’s process, where the cylinder is squashed and pulled to form a narrow flat tube. The extent to which this process is taken is governed entirely by the nature of the original cylinder and those minute variations in weight, form, feel which give each piece its unique character.

Entirely in keeping with the nature of the process up to this point, Hall limits himself to a very narrow band of glaze elements - material, colour, surface, line - which are stringently coerced and manipulated to arrive at that which is a necessity dictated by the form and process. All of these elements coalesce through recognition of that necessity and produce in the work a truth, an intimate rightness within which no distinction between surface and form, or between surface as embellishment of form and form itself exist.

Those who know Sam Hall will find the severity of these limitations - the simple, true form, the line and contour, the limited palette - entirely inconsistent, indicative as it is of a vigorous, reductive search leading to, and made possible by an honesty recognisable in both the man and his work.