An Interesting Event in 1983

 

In 1983 I was president of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design Student Union. Because of this I was invited, among a larger group who might be called at the time, the cream of Nova Scotian youth, along with the children of the politically connected and other hangers-on to meet the Prince and Princess of Wales, Charles and Diana. In retrospect after the untimely death of Diana, Princess of Wales, I have often reflected on my meeting with the charming young princess.

It was supposed to have been a garden party on the lawn of Government House, which at the time still had a view of the harbour. But as it was overcast and weather threatened, the reception was moved inside the Georgian mansion to the North Room. I lived nearby at 1257 Hollis Street and walked to Government House dressed in my snappy dark grey Salvation Army sports coat with matching grey felt pants and suede oxfords. Looking good in 1983 man!

I had expected ultra security as I turned off Bishop to Barrington and walked down the driveway to the portico where I was met by one lone Mountie dressed warmly, not in red serge, but in a regulation bomber jacket. “May I see your invitation sir”, he asked. I produced the invite and was waved inside.

Inside the historic building I was directed by a functionary into the North Room. At that time before renovations the North Room, the main ball room of the house was essentially unchanged from the storied days of John and Francis Wentworth and had the same look and feel and stink of death as the Red Chamber in Province House.

Taking a glass of wine from a long mahogany table groaning with sandwiches, French pastries, ornate flower arrangements flowing from elaborate silver repositories and ranges of over filled wine glasses, I checked out the scene. The atmosphere was close with a hint of sun baked curtains and mold, much like a certain antebellum mansion Penny and I visited many years later in Charleston, South Carolina, which had been left literally untouched since the Civil War.

Helping myself to another glass of wine I felt a certain breathless chill

fall over the room as another functionary announced the immanent arrival of their Royal Highnesses. As this reception was intended as a garden party the females in the room were dressed accordingly in light coloured knee length party dresses with matching hats of all descriptions, some wore white gloves. It made me wonder from what social caste these girls came from, as they were all done up en règle in garden party costume. It was a fair bet every one of them could pass muster at a Waegwoltic tennis social or a Junior Bengal Lancers ball. No dykes or odd balls wearing men’s clothing in this room.

Just as I was taking in this reflection the double doors at the end of the chamber shot open and a squeal arose from the girls, as if Simon LeBon had just walked in. I saw Prince Charles first squeezing away from the crowding party dresses who swarmed his wife. The crush around the princess was intense, but I could just make her out. She was dressed in a beautiful cream dress with copper trim, big copper buttons and a smart sailor hat with the same copper finish. A stunning garment and she was very pretty and young.

I noticed the Princess seemed a little ill at ease in the press of girls as if she were trapped. Her eyes moved from side to side looking to make contact and move on through the mob. Seeing my chance I put my glass down and positioned myself a little ahead of the bonnets and smiled at Diana. She spotted me instantly and reached out. The society girls looked on with some dismay as Diana moved past them and took my hand. I was perhaps the first male guest to exchange a few words with her at the party. I have no idea what I said, but it was pleasant and I knew she was just as nervous as I was, so I smiled again and wished her and her husband all the best and faded off. Looking back as I picked up another glass of wine from the mahogany table, I saw the party dresses envelop Diana once again and I felt sorry for the young princess.

After several glasses of wine and a couple canapés I felt a little more steady on my feet, in the social way so to speak and ready to say hello to Prince Charles. Prince Charles was done up in a nice toffee coloured, double breasted Duke of Windsor suit and seem quietly assured as he shook hands through a steady press of male admirers on the other side of the room.

Waiting in the queue I employed the same strategy as with Princess Diana and in an instant Charles’ eyes caught mine and out came the hand. I noticed he had a firm grip and he sized me up instantly. Caught my funny short hair, bad suite and John Lennon glasses. “So, tell me, what do you do?” he asked. I smiled broadly at the prince. “I’m an artist sir.” Prince Charles relaxed visibly at my reply. “Oh Really!” he replied. “Tell me are you one of those artist who it comes easily to, or do you have to work at it?” It was really such a charming and thoughtful question. “No Sir, I have to work at it, I replied.” Prince Charles smiled again, shook my had once more and very pleasantly closed off our conversation with, “Yes indeed, It’s the same with me, good luck.”

I don’t really remember much about the rest of the reception. Perhaps it was the wine. In due course a gentleman announced the Prince and Princess of Wales had left the room. This was our signal to clear out and out we went. I remember the strange sensation of walking out into the shabby real world of Barrington Street again. I paused under the portico, lit a cigarette and went on my way through the drizzle back to Hollis Street.

Kenneth Walker's Last Christmas at Home

My father Kenneth Walker at home for Christmas, December 28, 2009, 6834 Cook Avenue, Halifax, Nova Scotia

Acceptance and Rejection as an Artist, 2015, shredded paper

 

For the first twenty years of my practice I saved all the acceptance and rejection letters I received from the various granting agencies. I had the idea the documentation would be interesting. One day I shredded all the letters and this was the result. Now there are no more acceptance or rejection letters. It all comes through the email.

The Winnipeg Airport in 2006 (2007) collection Global Affairs Canada

My Canadian Forces Artist Program stills on Flickr

https://www.flickr.com/photos/132785798@N03/

I've put up all my CFAP pix on Flickr. The sets begin at CFB Halifax/Stadaconna, September 7, they observe life on board HMCS Halifax and on sea exercises, then our arrival at Norfolk, Virginia, September 17, 2015. This document is a prelude to the high def immersive vid I will produce over the next year and a half.

The Shattered House, American Linoleum Version, 2015

This is the sixth large version of the Shattered House. The Shattered Houses are based on a photograph of a smashed and distorted, but still standing house on Duffus Street in the aftermath of the 1917 Halifax explosion and come out of my Disaster Ship series last shown at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in 1998. Penny found this particular linoleum on Amazon. The significance of American linoleum as the 100th anniversary of the explosion nears struck me as a workable and appropriate metaphor in the evolving series.

To Be Heard With the Eye Only and Other Tales of Modernism, Emily Falvey, 2002, Part 1

Eric's note: this is Emily's catalogue essay for my Tokyo show at the Canadian Embassy in 2002. It's a brilliant, poetic, and insightful look into art practice. Well worth reading.


As you read these words there is a voice inside your head that does not make a sound. You hear nothing, but there is a tone nonetheless. And this tone is nothing but a particular, resonant feature in an immense and inaudible landscape of “sounds” that will follow you throughout your life, sonorities in the deaf and colours in the blind.

Such resonance constitutes one of the most profound ironies of the modern visual arts, a palpitation that ‘strikes the eye’ and makes it resonate, what Pascal Quingard once playfully referred to as l’oreille de l’oeil (the ear of / from the eye). It reminds us that in the tale of Narcissus (art for art’s sake) there is also an echo, that the retinal also has a moment of resonance, a refrain that Duchamp eloquently intoned with his Rotoreliefs, optical illusions that must be played like records. Modern art is above all its own undoing.

It was at the pitch of this irony that, during a twenty-year, highly romanticized period at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1967-1987), some of eastern Canada’s most resonant artwork was produced. It is work that retro-spection would like to cast as either neo-avant-garde or proto-postmodern, but which might be better described as a certain kind of modern echo. It was near the end of its overture that Ottawa based artist, Eric Walker, devised his aesthetic strategy, and it is within the cadence of its ironic and dissipated modernism that his work continues to resound.

Walker’s practice has for many years been tied discursively to what should be by now an anachronistic discord. Characterized perceptively on the one hand as “icons of a modern world,” his painted constructions, which he assembles from memory, local histories and detritus found in the streets, are derided almost paranoically on the other as “faux folk art.” Although we tend today to pay lip-service to alternative histories - exalting them as inverted, deconstructed, non-linear and marginal - our eyes continue to roll at the slightest indication of more ‘credulous,’ frequently spoken narrative types - like folklore for instance. You can hear the eyes rolling. Today we are ficto-critical; today the artist is an ethnographer.

On that note, one must not overlook certain structuralist leanings that tend to go in the other direction, defining Walker’s work in terms of semiotics. It seems a little unfortunate, however, to impound his multifaceted constructions at the “switching station” of discursive meanings, thus grounding them forcibly in written or textually based concepts of language. And while Walker’s work often involves textual insertions, they function more as compositional markers than discursive texts - simple descriptions within a more diverse articulation of movement and retrospection. Walker’s recent series of locomotives are, for instance, closer to enunciations than texts, mnemonic rather than linear documents. This is all the more evident given their status as inventions of hazard, which brings them closer to semiotisation than semiotics: the kind of play, both musical and rhythmic, that one might find animating a composition or resonating throughout an arrangement.