John Walker

John Walker was born in Aurora, Illinois, trained at the College of DuPage and the American Academy of Art in Chicago, and made a living as an airbrush artist and illustrator. The pictures tell stories with invented artifacts: antique pull toys, plants, animals, and junk-shop curios assembled into chimeras that feel familiar and slightly wrong.

Realistic rendering, graphic design, stylization, and actual three-dimensional objects share the same frame. Spare animal bits and inanimate leftovers become the bodies. They look like a fairy-tale creature until you notice the toy wheel or the botanical leftover. The landscapes are often empty except for those figures, which is how the humor gets in. A streak of dark humor rides along. Pop surrealism, or the newer contemporary shelf, is the nearest label. He is not illustrating a myth you already know. He is building the artifact first and letting the story catch up.

Awards include Best in Show at the Richeson 75 International Portrait and Figure Competition and the National Society of Painters in Casein and Acrylic Award at the 59th Annual NSPC&A Exhibit. The work has appeared in the AcrylicWorks Best of Acrylic Painting annuals, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine #39, Spectrum Art annual, Acrylic Artist magazine, and the French contemporary art magazine Hey!.

The airbrush years trained a hand that could make a toy look heavier than it is. Aurora is still the origin, College of DuPage and the Chicago academy still the training, but the desk now is the junk shop and the empty field. AcrylicWorks, Beautiful Bizarre, Spectrum, Acrylic Artist, Hey!: the magazines took the chimera out of the studio and put it on a page that has to compete with other people’s pictures. It holds. Dark humor is the mercy. Without it the creature would only be clever.

Look at the toy parts before you look at the face. That is usually where the story started. The empty field is not unfinished. It is the pause that lets the chimera occupy the room.