7 – 11 May 2020

Ben Walker’s recent paintings refer to a distinct era of British culture and TV programmes and films – 1970s and 1980s educational programmes for schools, childrens’ films and public information films.  Looking back, television broadcasts and films from this time often seemed imbued with a strange, otherly quality.  

Much of the source imagery he uses seems familiar, comforting, and yet it is also unsettling or eerie. It is these qualities in the paintings, which are impressions of half remembered, misremembered or an imagined past, that exist on the edges of memory and nostalgia where ideas of folklore, the unknown, the wyrd, science fiction and the supernatural are meshed together. Embedded in these paintings is the loss of childhood innocence and with it, the death of a bygone utopia.

The paintings are on coarse textured linen.  The oil paint, thinned with turps, is scrubbed into the weave of the linen, and then may be removed and repainted over and over.  Consequently, traces of earlier incarnations often remain visible in the finished picture, articulating the hauntological theme of the past repeating into the present.

‘This painting was part of a series based on themes of time, place and memory.  Like others in the series, it was based on found images, in this case footage of a drive through English countryside, filmed perhaps in the 1980s.  In paint, I simplified the image, building up thin layers of warm colour then overlaying with areas of green, and sketching in the outline of the road.  I’m interested in the notion that the familiar or everyday could carry something hidden or something that becomes significant, and I try to paint in a way that suggests this.’

See Ben’s Website and Instagram

Pleasure Gardens
Oil on linen
35cm x 45cm