Untitled abstract

Sandy Walker

During the 1980s, Walker began making woodblock prints. After painting the blocks directly in the landscape, creating his subjects, he would return to the studio and cut and print the blocks.

Sandy Walker uses the enhanced rough grain of the surface of the wood plank and gouged out negative areas to create a simple, tensioned abstract composition that belies its small format. The edition, as usual, is small - in this case 10 impressions. Walker hand applied a sumi ink gray wash to the background to add color, which varies from impression to impression.

Walker was recognized for these works in 1989 when he won a prestigious Isadora Duncan Dance Award for Visual Design. That same year Walker also had his first important museum exhibition at the Riverside Art Museum. Shows at the Nicolaysen Art Museum (Casper, WY), the San Jose Museum of Art, the Fresno Art Museum, the Ulrich Museum of Art (Wichita, KS) and the Triton Museum (Santa Clara, CA), followed throughout the next more than two decades.