Noted American contemporary painter John Walker, Professor of Graduate Painting and Head of Painting Department at the College of Fine Arts, Boston University was invited to teach a three-week courses for postgraduates in the Department of Oil Painting, CAFA, on October 7 going through to October 25, 2013. The courses was intended to offer the students contemporary Western art thinking training on the basis of traditional oil painting training, to enhance students’ understandings and creativity in contemporary art, to promote the expansion of the academic vision, a new pioneering practice for the teaching of the Department of Oil Painting in the contemporary art context.

The courses aim to encourage students to think independently; to encourage students to generously share ideas with each other, especially recommended is a collective cooperation and mutual support and assistance when artists are intending to challenge the traditional standards; learning the abstract painting from the perspective of figurative painting, it carries the contents as much as any other art form, and likewise attempts to “bring the feeling into the image”.

The three-week course by Prof. Walker is based on collective creative practice, interspersed with lectures by John Walker, sharing with the students the artworks that have touched him over the last six decades of his painting career. During the period of the course, Prof. Walker offers instruction and discussion to the students one by one every day.

About John Walker

He studied at the Birmingham School of Art in England and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in France. Works collected in the British Museum, the Australian National Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Fogg Art Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection, Yale Center for British Art, the Scottish National Gallery, the Tate Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship; first prize, John Moores Exhibition in Liverpool, England; first prize, Bradford International Print Biennale in Yorkshire, England; and the Harkness Fellowship, New York.?As one of the important painters of the senior generation still active in the Western art circles, Prof. John Walker advocates direct painting language, emphasizing extremely focusing on traditional culture during the painting creation. Since the 1960s, Professor Walker’s works have been in the collection of all world-renowned museums and art institutions, and won the Morse Painting Award in 1976, Guggenheim Scholar Award in 1981, and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1985. Walker loves to be an art teacher, has taught in the Royal Academy of Art, London, Melbourne Academy of Fine Arts, Cooper Union in New York, School of Graduates of Yale University, Columbia University, etc., since 1993 he has directed the Painting Graduate Program of College of Fine Art, Boston University, which is considered one of the most famous and scarce graduate programs dominated by simple fine painting. Prof. Walker’s paintings and his art educational notions are important references for art education.

Text and photo: Li Jiao from the Department of Oil Painting

Translated by Chen Peihua and edited by Sue/CAFA ART INFO