During the 1980's Walker received early acclaim for his work in photo- drawing, photography, and sculpture. In the 1990's Douglas turned to painting and recently reduced his palette to the Blue and White for which he is now known for. Through these disparate media he has consistently articulated a finely wrought vision of the beautiful residing in the strange . Characteristic of his work is the provocation of dread and delight in the unfamiliar.
Considered a unique talent, Douglas stands apart from his contemporaries in his uncanny ability to make works of a compelling originality regardless of media.
Walker has exhibited his work at the ICA in London and the Dia foundation in New York. In Toronto he has shown at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Powerplant, YYZ, Mercer Union and at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. Walker has been the focus of a traveling mid-career retrospective curated by The Mendel Art gallery in Saskatoon and an overview of his career was featured at the Kitchener-Waterloo Art gallery. He has also shown at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the Dunlop Art Gallery in Regina, the Agnes Etherington Art Centre in Kingston, the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography in Ottawa, Hallwalls in Buffalo, and the 49th Parallel in New York City. Many of these exhibitions were supported with publications.
Douglas’s work is included in many important public and private collections most notably the Art Gallery of Ontario, Mendel Art Gallery and Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography. He has received awards from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council and the Toronto Arts Council. Walkers work has captured extensive media and critical attention wherever he has exhibited. He is currently represented by the Jennifer Kostuik gallery in Vancouver and the Nicholas Metivier gallery in Toronto.
"Before becoming an artist there have been other jobs. I worked during high-school as a draftsman in a small building firm and later put myself through art college as a mannequin makeup artist. A lot of that stuff seems unrelated to what I do now, but I've noticed that repeated actions tend to mark the memory. Once I felt the need to have the date, the untitled number and a recipe code, in stiff lettering on the front of a painting. (I'm a inveterate record keeper and a big user of TLA's . I keep track of the how the paintings are made and code and number everything.) So I did it, and then later, after doing it for a while I recognized the impulse as an echo from the stacks of technical drawings I've done in the past. Sometimes more profound forces seem to work their way into the paintings. My father was a gardener and our yard was always full of plants and flowers. It was a world seething with life to an almost scary degree. There was always some bug or plant creeping from the soil. That fecund energy seems to have worked its way into my compositions. I'm never sure about these things but it seems possible and I'm content to leave it at that.
There's a wide range of people and things I feel the influence of. Suspension bridges, landscapes by J.M. Turner, paintjobs on funnycars, skyscraper drawings by Hugh Ferriss, chinoiserie, moon paintings by Chesley Bonestell, blue and white pottery, pinups by Alberto Vargas, botanical illustrations, the DIY technique of Henri Rousseau, airbrush illustrations of tools in old catalogues, the fantasies of John Martin, Chinese brush painting and children's books. I can quickly filter a lot of stuff through the question; 'is it interesting?' The music of Burt Bacharach confirms my belief that style can be profound. Old National Geographic magazines have been a rich source of inspiration. An article in one told of heavy water flowing down slopes at the bottom of the oceans, making rivers that cascade in total darkness over cliffs, no one to see the plumes of sediment rising in slow motion from these underwater Niagaras. Trying to imagine what that might look like makes me want to paint.
It's my intention to make paintings that ask 'what is that?, 'where is that?, who is that?, and when is this'? I delight in the unexplored and the excitement of discovery and I love it when it all works and the viewer feels it too. "
Douglas Walker
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