The Inland Sea, 2026, 71 x 71 cms, oil paint and oxidized metal on plywood

 

The Inland Sea/Winter, 2026, 51 x 51 cms. oxidized metal and oil paint on plywood.

 

Gerard Walker's Harris Island 1979 (photo image, Steering into The Sea)

Harris Island lays among the Tusket Islands, south and west of Wedgeport, Nova Scotia. It is a staging location for lobster fishermen who fish for lobster around the southern waters of the Tusket archipelago.  My Pothier family come from Wedgeport and lobster fishing is a feature of our life. My late brother Gerard felt a close attachment to both Wedgeport and the Tusket Islands, particularly Harris Island where my late uncle Vernon Pothier had his shanty. Some time toward the end of the 1970’s Gerard decided to do a photo documentary about the lobster fishers on Harris Island. Aided by our late cousin Donny Pothier and Vernon Pothier Gerard made his study.

The images he created were completed in the form of a portfolio book. The photos were hand printed at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design on multi-grade resin coated paper and dry mounted on board. The group were ring bound and presented in a hand made canvas covered box.

The photographs are black and white and done in the prevailing documentary style evolved from picture magazines like Life and Look, but with the narrative quality of National Film Board films and stills. Gerard had sold some photos to the National Film Board Stills Division and had an eye for images that might interest them. The pictures also have a kind of pictorial focus, images of fishermen and dory’s, influenced by local photographers Wallace R. MacAskill and the more contemporary Sherman Hines, as well as the marine romanticism of Peggy’s Cove genre painter William Degarth.

Now some fifty years in the past, Gerard’s pictures bring back to life a mode of lobster fishing that is now gone. His Harris Island study is a collection well worth preserving.

 

Please follow the link below to my Google Drive to see the collection.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/11T06xYO_-XUrV4Z_ct1OfX9jdgbO6K6K/view?usp=drive_link

 

Point Saint Charles Interactive, 2003, 49 x 122, collection, Global Affaires Canada (Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade,) Ottawa, installed at Canada Senate, Ottawa, July 2026

 

Bethlehem's Sparrows Point at Duluth in 1973, (2026) 48 x 62 cms., pencil, pastel and oil paint on plywood in a vintage frame

 

Niagara Falls in 1842, from a Daguerreotype, 31 x 42 cms, oil pastel and oil paint on plywood, in vintage frame, 2026 and copy of original Daguerreotype

 

Eric Walker CV

 

 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NJ5P5m8vNCX_pzRB-5PFP59qCX_f2vub/view?usp=sharing

The Hurricane Fiona set, four works, 2025

The Hurricane Fiona set. 

1) Fiona Over Water, 58 x 58 cms, oil painting on plywood, 2) Fiona Sable Island 1, 31 x 34 cms, painted construction, oil paint and metal on plywood, 3) Fiona Sable Island 2, 31 x 34 cms, painted construction, oil paint and metal on plywood, 4) Fiona Sable Island 3, 31 x 34 cms painted construction, oil paint, metal, screen mesh and roofing shingle on plywood.

 

Lethbridge, Alberta, Railway Lands at the Southern Alberta Art Gallery, 2005

In 2005 the Ottawa Art Gallery toured my Railway Lands show to the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (SAAG), in Lethbridge, Alberta.

As an artist you never know when you go to a new place if the people you meet will be pleasant and supportive, or indifferent and patronizing. No matter how accomplished you are as artist, you are from time to time at the mercy of directors or curators who believe they're doing you a favour by showing your work.

With that in mind and with some hesitation, I flew out to Lethbridge, Alberta to install Railway Lands at The Southern Alberta Art Gallery. I didn’t know anyone from SAAG, just names from letters and emails. I got into the arrivals area in Lethbridge airport and was on the look out for someone named Jason. I scanned the room looking for an art gallery type, when a young man with long curly blond hair stepped up to an old farmer standing next me and asked him if he was Eric Walker? Jason was the show preparator and a keen young guy. After sorting out the greeting, he drove me to the Southern Alberta Art Gallery and introduced me to Joan Stebbins, Marilyn Smith and the others in the gallery. Afterwards we walked around the gallery and discussed how the art would be hung.

The flight from Ottawa to Calgary and Lethbridge was a bit tiring so I was glad when Jason drove me to my motel, The Village Inn, on the northeast corner of 4^ht Avenue South and Scenic. He drove there the long way to pass the motel’s sign on 4th. “Look at that,” he said, pointing up at it. It read in big letters, SO ALTA ART GALLERY PRESENTS GUNILLA JOSEPHSON AND ERIC WALKER. Now that’s first class, I thought to my self. After checking in I walked down Scenic Drive to a local liquor store, recommended by the motel manager and bought myself a bottle of scotch. 

Back in my room I pulled the curtains and looked out onto the western horizon, with Scenic Drive in the foreground and the sun beginning to set over the coulee. I poured myself a glass of whiskey and sat there until the sun gradually blazed up crimson and faded away. My face was red the next morning from being magnified by the motel room window, but nobody at SAAG noticed. I got to work with Jason laying out the works. Later that day Joan Stebbins took me to the Penny Coffee House to meet Gunilla Josephson and her partner the novel writer Lewis Desoto.

Gunilla and Lewis were both pretty cool, dressers and cigarette smokers. I learned Gunilla and Joan were good friends from way back and Gunilla didn’t hesitate to tell Joan how much she disliked the Village Inn, a come down from the last time she had shown at the Southern Alberta. Later that day, I once again sat at the table in my room at the Village Inn with a glass, watching the traffic passing by on Scenic in the red glare of another blinding sunset. It would be three more days before Penny came out.

It is a two hour time difference from Ottawa to Lethbridge, so I was still getting up early. I recall drinking tea, looking out the bathroom window to the reddening eastern horizon and listening to the early news on a Calgary TV station. My morning routine began with a walk over to the Tim Hortons for coffee, then down the street to a pancake house for breakfast, where the service was pretty good, friendly people. From the pancake house I made my way up to the Penny for a better coffee and a newspaper. I had time to kill before the folks at SAAG got to work, so after coffee I would wonder around Lethbridge taking pictures. One evening, after my daily visit to the gallery, Jason took me to a club somewhere around 2^nd Avenue. It was a pretty cool place, grooving kids, a bit shaggy and unkempt, sweet jazzy music. Gunilla was there. She and I might have looked out of place in such a joint, except we were visiting artists with Jason, a not uncommon sight in Lethbridge.

  

It had been arranged beforehand that I would make a presentation, but I only discovered on the day, it was to be in an Art Now type seminar class at Lethbridge University. I prepared a text and slides in advance, so I was prepared, but instead of speaking to 20 art students, this was a general arts course of 200. I was warned beforehand that at 12 sharp most of the people would get up and leave. And so it was. I stopped my presentation at noon; big round of applause, then asked the actual art students who stayed around, to come down to the stage for a more intimate talk.

After another blazing, irradiating, sunset over Lethbridge and the solitude of my hotel room, Jason and I went out to the airport next morning to pick up Penny. Penny noticed right away that my face was sun burned. Indefatigable as a host, Jason drove us around Lethbridge then into the coulee to see the historic Indian battle site and the base of the famous CP Bridge over the Old Man River.   

That evening Joan and Luke Stebbins had a dinner party at their house on the west side of the coulee, for Gunilla and Lewis and Penny and I. Marilyn Smith and her partner Darryl also attended. Joan and Luke’s beautiful modern home was built into the top of the coulee and had a fabulous view to the south and east. The house was filled with art, all very tasteful and chosen with care. I asked Luke, a noted biology professor at the University of Lethbridge about the wildlife in the coulee. He told me he occasionally took a gun down into the coulee while walking his dog because of the coyotes, but otherwise not much other than rabbits, snakes and rodents. I remember dinner was a beautiful planked salmon Luke cooked, with a sprightly green salad, very good BC wine and a sorbet to finish. There was much good conversation and I got a little tipsy. Nothing obvious, but the latter part of the party is a bit of a blur. We drove back to the Village Inn with Gunilla and Lewis.     

  

It seems to me the opening was the next evening, but I may be wrong. Anyway, before the event we all gathered, artists, loved ones and gallery staff for a big dinner at a Chinese restaurant called the Regent. The dinner was lively and deluxe in every respect. The Schezuan beef was particularly memorable. 

The opening itself was very pleasant, a good turnout, lots to see with my work in the Carnegie space and Gunilla’s multi media work down stairs in the new gallery. I remember I chatted with David Hoffos for a while. Later that evening we moved on to another opening at a private gallery nearby. The work was pretty interesting and the place was packed with local art students and teachers, some who had been at my opening, others I didn’t recognize. Once again Gunilla and I were treated with much deference. One of the exhibiting artists, a young woman, who perhaps had too much to drink, kissed me.

   

Next morning Penny and I picked up a rent a car and set off on a road trip to Waterton National Park. Waterton National Park is a joint US/Canada park, called Glacier National Park in the United States and quite unique. Our road trip took us out of the prairie, into the foothills, right to the base of the Rockies, where the little tourist town of Waterton sits on a long lake, which reaches into Montana. On the way in we saw a bear cub on the road. Penny stopped the car and we waited until the cub moved along, knowing that momma bear was somewhere nearby watching.

Waterton was just shutting down for the season when we got there. We noted the Shining type hotel resort on the hill, the tiny RCMP detachment office done up as a log cabin, the last chance gas station and the comprehensive tourist lodge with cabins opening up on the rocky lake shore. The wind was up and the beach was empty. We stood around watching the chop on the lake, cold in the glaring sun. After a lunch of hamburgers and fries at the lodge, we drove further into the park to the falls and Red Rock Canyon. I’d never been to a canyon before, so it sounded cool, like in a cowboy movie. As it turned out Red Rock Canyon was pretty narrow, but curious and geological with stratified reddish sandstone. The real canyons I later realized were along the road to the park where the foothills drop off at the base of the mountains. 

Everything I saw that day was startling and beautiful. As a snobbish Nova Scotian I had no impression at all about Alberta and the Rockies and didn’t care. I left Waterton Park and Southern Alberta with an indelible love for the magnificent and sublime landscape I saw there. Fulfilling his final duty Jason drove Penny and I to Lethbridge Airport the next morning, where we flew away in the cloudless sky to Calgary and home.

The Triumph of Rural Electrification c. 1984 and I’ll Dance With Anyone She Said, Even the Devil, c.1984, both private collection, Halifax. Two early painted constructions probably shown at Eye Level Gallery, Halifax, c. 1984.

 

The Triumph of Rural Electrification is related to my Antigonish works. A small, mostly lost series. I spent a week at the Coady Institute of Saint Francis Xavier University c. 1984 in Antigonish researching the Antigonish Co-op Movement with a particular interest in Moses Coady and Jimmy Thompkins. This work tries to convey the optimism of the Antigonish Movement. It is composed from tarpaper, vinyl, yellow insulation material and burlap potato sack on wood.

I’ll Dance With Anyone She Said, Even the Devil Is related to an earlier body of work influenced by Helen Creighton’s Nova Scotian folklore books. The image is a rendering of a common folklore theme, that of a girl wishing to have a partner at the local dance, who then discovers the handsome young gentleman she meets is in fact the Devil. The story is always given away by the girl discovering the handsome young man has cloven feet. The setting is a lonely field in the Annapolis Valley. The work is constructed from carpet, vinyl and paint, on wood.

Vanguard Review, A Brief History, Eye Level Gallery 1986 by Donna Smyth

 

Center Block Cribbage Board, c. 2000, approx. 36 cms. long, 13 cms. wide and 4 cms. deep, constructed from copper roofing material on a wood base, private collection Ottawa

The Center Block Cribbage Board is memento of the Canadian Houses of Parliament in Ottawa. It is constructed with oxidized copper roofing salvaged from the 1997 Center Block roof restoration.
 

Musical Promotion Can, kinetic sound sculpture, circa 2000, collection the artist

The Musical Promotion Can is a kinetic, sound sculpture constructed from a Clarks Beans coin saving can, commonly distributed to children in Canadian schools in the 1960's, attached to a modified music box works, set into a wood base covered with vintage linoleum.
 

The Lost Salt Gift of Blood, approx , 90 x 50 cms, mixed media on plywood, c.1988, private collection , Toronto

Based of a short story by Alistair Macleod, the Lost Salt Gift of Blood is constructed on a burlap potato sack with paint and found objects.

Ottawa Citizen Web Page, 2018

From an Ottawa Citizen web page about the CFAP G7 exhibition at the Canadian War Museum. Here I am during my CFAP G7 deployment on HMCS Halifax in 2015. You'll find a Vimeo link to the video I made about the experience, The View From Point Pleasant, deeper in the blog.

Everest, 2025, 4:37, experimental boxing documentary, screened at Antimatter, Victoria B.C., October 23, 2025, photo by Dave Johnson

Everest is an experimental boxing documentary. The work is structured as a series of four fights. The fights are introduced by a commentator, followed by a spotlight on boxers, then three or four bouts until finally, Everest, the fight of the century. The work is constructed from a found black and white 16mm, non-theatrical circulating film from the 1940’s? An 800 ft. film with a cartoon, girl singer and three short documentary subjects which might have been shown in pre-television days in a community hall. The fight segment of the film was cut into one-foot sections which were scraped, scratched, misted and splattered, imagery of boxing injury, then reassembled with a commentator, the girl singer from the first film segment and cut together out of sequence in a rhythmic way to make an experimental boxing documentary.

A Sure Sign of Prosperity in 2024 when Bruce Barber Photographs a Containership at Black Rock Beach, J, and V versions, 2025

A Sure Sign of Prosperity in 2024 when Bruce Barber Photographs a Containership at Black Rock Beach, two versions, J version, 20 x 38 cms, oil paint and linoleum on vintage plywood and V version, 26 x 45 cms, oil paint on plywood, framed in a hand made frame constructed from a found vintage gold leaf Egyptian frame.The works are based on a photograph of Black Rock Beach (2024) by Bruce Barber and is name checked from my, A Sure Sign of Prosperity in 1984 when the Giant Containership Atlantic Companion Calls on Halifax, 1984, private collection.

Black Rock Beach with Lightning, for Benjamin Chee Chee, 22 x 40 cms, oil paint on plywood

An evolution of the Bruce Barber/Black Rock beach set. It is in homage to the artist Benjamin Chee Chee (1944-1977) who died in despair in the cells of the old Ottawa police station, where the Ottawa Art Gallery now stands.

 

Sambro Fog Cannon, 27 x 32 cms, oil sketch on plywood in hand painted vintage frame

The Sambro fog cannon is mentioned in a 19th century navigation guide to the Nova Scotia coast.

 

Not A Still Life, Ottawa Sun, February 4, 1997

 The work on the wall is Fast New Steamer to America, collection Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.