Emma Walker
Recent Paintings 2007

"Still in her mid-30s, Emma Walker is already one of Australia’s most convincing and original painters. Her work is as audacious as it is poetic; the one quality leavens the other, so that just as delicate reverie sets in, you’re pulled up by a less immediately seductive note, an act of painterly boldness or some other form of tough, enlivening aesthetic decision.

Walker’s work gets stronger with the years, treading the sometimes overtrodden path between representation and abstraction in a way quite unlike any of her contemporaries. She orchestrates her constantly returned-to motifs – seas, inlets, rivers, headlands, skies, clouds and shadow – in ways that are constantly invigorating.

The emotions and moods of her works are conjured directly out of the processes of painting, unmediated by theory or jargon. And yet these are intelligent paintings – intelligent in their understanding of ambiguities, of space, and of colour. They are extremely sensitive to mood, at times reminiscent of the work of the American Luminists – especially Martin Johnson Heade’s atmospheric subtlety and bold use of pooling blacks in paintings such as Approaching Thunder Storm, 1859, and Thunder Storm on Narragansett Bay, 1868. But Walker updates the idiom with her bold and brushy way with paint and her tremendous array of textural effects.

Her works on paper are also compelling, suggesting new possibilities of texture and scale, playing deftly with poetic links between the microscopic in nature and the distantly observed'.

- Sebastian Smee