Picking Up the Long End

Clayton E. Walker

An undulating landscape or structure sprawls across the sheet in Clayton Walker’s large format, intricate color woodcut. A common approach in Walker’s woodcuts was the use of saturated, often primary colors, presented in bold swaths like brushstrokes and enmeshed with delicate, kinetic linework. In both his figurative and non representational compositions, movement is inevitable, and in “Picking Up the Long End” he carries the viewer’s eye from end to end and off the sheet, as though the abstract subject is on parade.

A life of constant discovery led Walker from Kentucky to Europe and finally to Southern California, where he built a home that itself served as a massive art project, as well as his studio and personal gallery, for the final forty years of his life. Much like his woodcuts, his home reflected Walker’s unstoppable energy.