Donald Walker was an artist who worked at NIAD Art Center in the 1990s. His paintings and drawings merge elements of Mexican folk art, Mesoamerican sculpture, and modern cartoons, resulting in images that are at once stoic and playful.
Many of Walker’s works feature tender and expressive portraits of care workers, housemates, or familiar faces from TV. In his drawings, bodies often emerge from chattering clouds of sound: letters fill the space around figures, and leave winding trails atop abstract compositions. Sometimes, these letters amass into cacophonous fields, webs, and chains that separate or bridge the far edges of the paper surface.
Walker spoke quietly to himself and to his paintings as he made them. His handwritten text may capture snippets from these private, canvas-side conversations, as well as phrases associated with the figures depicted. In Untitled (De Nada) for example, the repeated “de nada” can be interpreted as an expression commonly recited by the pictured care worker, or a sentiment Walker himself would like to share with them.
Donald Walker’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, including those at Ames Gallery, Berkeley, CA; Left Field, Los Osos, CA; Narrative, Oakland, CA; Outsider Art Fair, New York, NY; and NIAD Art Center, Richmond, CA.
