Frank Walter | Music of the Spheres Exhibition

29 July - 25 September 2021

Click below to watch an exhibition walk-through, with the voice of Frank Walter reading his own words; 'On Art - A Planter's Feeling'
Frank Walter
Untitled (Green sea, biege sky)
Oil on asphalt roofing material with Masonite backing
22 cm diameter

In recent years Antiguan artist Frank Walter (1926-2009), has emerged as one of the most distinctive and intriguing voices of Caribbean art of the last 50 years. At the 2017 edition of the Venice Biennale - where Walter’s work was presented as Antigua and Barbuda’s inaugural pavilion - Hans-Ulrich Obrist described the artist as “a pioneer” author of “an unbelievable body of work, which has not been seen so far […] He was the Leonardo da Vinci of Antigua”. In 2020, a major retrospective of several hundred works was staged at MMK Museum of Modern Art Frankfurt.

There were no exhibitions of his work during his lifetime, other than those he assembled in his studio and home, but he made extravagant plans for how and where his work might be presented. In his writings, he described the way people would move through a light-filled gallery with paintings on the walls and sculpture in the centre of the space "creating dynamic movement and flow."

In our exhibition for the Edinburgh Art Festival, we paid tribute to his vision in presenting his carvings of whales, fish and birds alongside his previously unseen series of ‘Spool’ paintings. The small, circular paintings, that are amongst the most visionary paintings of Walter’s career and provide a compelling lens through which to witness the workings of his inner eye.

As art historian and chronicler of Walter’s life Barbara Paca writes in a new book, published to this summer, “Walter’s spools reveal themselves as portals, portholes, telescopes and microscopes. They offer an artistic lexicon of this painting career, ranging from figuration to total abstraction. They are his most direct and focussed paintings, with each work going straight to the essential essence of the subject portrayed… they are amongst his most sublime and exquisite works.”
Frank Walter
Untitled (Light green - grey sky and dark blue sea)
oil on biocomposite material, backed with Masonite
21.8 cm diameter

"The circular form, especially in relation to the seascapes, connects to a specific event in 1965. Walter had returned from Europe to the Caribbean four years earlier, initially to Antigua, where he learned of the sugar industry’s decline, and then to Dominica where he was able to secure a small parcel of land that he named Mount Olympus. In the spring of 1965, he boarded the ship ‘Tu Ascania’ for an intended return to England, but travelling without proper papers, and having suffered a mental breakdown, he was denied entry to the United Kingdom and was effectively incarcerated in his cabin.

He conceived these seascapes from three perspectives: a telescope, the porthole in his cabin at sea, and the dramatic stage of his inner eye. They are amongst his most sublime works, exquisitely painted, often featuring skeins of birds, flying in a formation over the still sea, with clouds backlit by nearly imperceptible white and grey streaks, and the horizon accented with fine black lines. These images recall the observations of Walter’s prose writings and his descriptions of sea voyages within the Caribbean, and to Europe, in which he describes the first sighting of land shifting slowly into focus through the porthole in his cabin. The colours of these seascapes are often pushed to surprising, and apparently unnaturalistic, extremes with sandy yellow seas under lavender skies, or forest green water beneath a saturated red. This chromatic intensity recalls some of his more strenuous autobiographical accounts, and in particular the moment during his cabin-bound imprisonment on board the ‘Tu Ascasnia’ when a porthole first became a portal to another world in a powerful vision of Neptune astride a great green dolphin."

[Barbara Paca 'An Introduction to Frank Walter’s Spool Series' in Music of the Spheres, Ingleby, Edinburgh 2021, p.12]
Artworks
Frank Walter
Untitled (Mango)
Oil on biocomposite material with Masonite backing
19.5 cm diameter
'Frank Walter’s spool paintings of roses sit at the intersection of his Romantic sensibility, his pursuits in horticulture and botany, and his efforts to make the invisible realms of his inner psyche visible through his art. Embedded within abstract planes, Walter’s roses materialize from uncertain origins. Like Pythagoras’ notion of a harmonious, spherical universe, the rose is a series of spiralling red petals. Walter’s paintings of single flowers are a repeated motif, as are cartographic paintings of Antigua, and in one work, these two series come together as the island appears like a microorganism swimming in a petri dish. Antigua morphs into a two-dimensional crimson rose, radiating membranes of blue, green, black and white.'

[Mary-Elisabeth Moore,'The Cosmos in Frank Walter's Spool Paintings' in Music of the Spheres, Edinburgh 2021, pp. 95-96]
- Frank Walter
  Untitled (Jumbie seeds, abstract botany)
  oil on biocomposite material, backed with Masonite
  19.5 cm diameter
- Frank Walter
  Untitled (Pale Hibiscus)
  Oil on pressed fibre with Masonite backing
  19.5 cm diameter
'Atop the stony terrain of an unfamiliar planet, a man in white sits or hovers. With left arm outstretched, he rests his hand on a green beam of light, shooting across a black, nocturnal sky. Here is Frank Walter— poet, painter, philosopher, musician—welcoming us to the Fourth Dimension. How did we get here?'

[Mary-Elisabeth Moore,'The Cosmos in Frank Walter's Spool Paintings' in Music of the Spheres, Edinburgh 2021, p. 91]
- Frank Walter
  Untitled (Lilac sky, blue green sea)
  oil on biocomposite material, backed with Masonite
  21.8 cm diameter
- Frank Walter
  Untitled (Yellow sky, blue sea)
  Oil on pressed fibre with Masonite backing
  21 cm diameter
Frank Walter
Untitled (Crescent moon)
oil on biocomposite material, backed with Masonite
21.5 cm diameter

“In their completeness as a group, the spool series brings together all the elements of Walter’s universe, with each painting fitting together in dynamic groupings to provide an investigation into the workings of Walter’s mind… Walter’s use of a round format is a distinct choice loaded with symbolism… circles represent the cyclical, infinite nature of existence…. To borrow Walter’s words, ‘variety comes with the never-ending music of the spheres’. Throughout his artistic practice, Walter, in effect, is striking the balance between the universe’s larger patterns and the smaller details of lived experience.”

(Barbara Paca Phd, OBE, “How I became European: Frank Walter in Retrospect” in Frank Walter A Retrospective, MMK Frankfurt, 2020, pp 398-400)

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