-1MOURNING-WORK IN THE PAINTINGS OF JOHN A.

WALKER

S. Orman

Mourning- or grief-work describes the complex psychic labour performed by

individuals or social groups in response to a loss or trauma of some kind - usually a

death - with which they are trying to come to terms. The concept was explored in

1917 - at the time of the First World War - by Sigmund Freud in an essay on

mourning and melancholia. (1) Many other psychoanalysts and theorists have

discussed it since and it has also been employed by art therapists because they

believe that making and viewing art can assist the processes of mourning and

healing.

In Walker’s case mourning is not a response to the death of an individual such as a

friend or a family member but is a profound sadness prompted by the inhuman

behaviour and needless loss of life evident in such events as wars, genocides, racism,

murder, torture, slavery, terrorist acts of violence, and the waste and pollution that

is risking all human life on planet Earth. Mourning can be a long process that is

often hard to resolve or reach a state of closure. In the case of events such as the

First World War and the Nazi Holocaust, the scale of human suffering was so great

that they cannot and should not be forgotten or ignored by later generations; hence,

the establishment of war memorials, monuments, annual days of remembrance and

Holocaust museums. Walker was born in 1938 and his early childhood was scarred

by Nazi bombing raids in which family members were killed. He soon learned about

the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the post war exposure of
the Nazi death camps, and then experienced the fear of nuclear annihilation during

the Cold War period; later he lived in London during the IRA’s bombing campaign.

It is no wonder, therefore, that he developed a critical and pessimistic view of his

own species and its many imperfections. He feels shame and guilt because he is also

a flawed human being capable of emotions such as hatred and anger towards others.

As he nears the time of his own death, the fact that humanity seems unable to learn

from its past mistakes causes him distress; wars, atrocities, genocides and conflicts

continue and he now realises he will not live long enough to see any significant

improvement. (Of course, this does not mean that the struggle for improvement

should be abandoned.) For this reason mourning-work can be regarded as

perpetual. If one learns to accept or tolerate the imperfections of humanity then

internal stress may be reduced but the downside is that one may end up tolerating

brutalities that should never be tolerated or excused.

Grief is not made visible in his paintings via expressionist gestures of the brush but

by means of a kneeling female figure with bowed head draped in classical-style

robes. This figurative personification was borrowed from a fine funerary statue

discovered in a local churchyard in Esher, Surrey. (2) The statue - repeated from

canvas to canvas - enables the emotion of grief to be objectified and externalised

while maintaining a certain distance from the painter’s own inner feelings. The

existence of such statues and similar representations such as van Gogh’s drawing

‘Sorrow’ (1882) and Käthe Kollwitz’s sculptures ‘Grieving parents’ (1932) Vladslo

Cemetery, Belgium, made it unnecessary to devise something new. The fact that
such conventional representations cut across the divide between academic and

modern art signal an unexpected common denominator.

The paintings are all oil on linen and share the same oblong shape and size: 140 x

100 cm. ‘1914-18’ mourns the millions of soldiers from the ‘civilised’ nations of

Europe who slaughtered one another during the First World War.
Deluded by patriotism, the soldiers were both the perpetrators of mass murder and

its victims. The figure of grief stands in a vast landscape of war graves marked by

white crosses. Ironically, most of the combatants on both sides of the conflict were

followers of Christianity - a religion supposedly opposed to killing. (Christ once

remarked: ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’) The

grieving statue appears within a pyramid of lines of crosses that recede to a

vanishing point above the top edge of the canvas. However, the emphatic

perspectival recession is counterbalanced by the flatness of the pattern of crosses

aligned with the surface of the canvas. Similarly, the symmetry of the composition is

relieved by the random scatter or red roses growing among the crosses. The vivid

red hue of the roses, of course, is a reminder of the blood spilled on the battlefields.

Walker’s own paternal grandfather - whom he never met - died on the fields of
Flanders. His name appears on a memorial but there is no grave because his body

was never found. His other grandfather he did know briefly before he was killed in a

German bombing air raid during the Second World War.

Freud, of course, was Jewish and ended his days in London as a refugee from Nazi-

occupied Austria. ‘ “The Tube” at Treblinka’ commemorates some of the victims of

the Nazi Holocaust.

Shortly after arriving by train at the death camp of Treblinka in Poland, prisoners

were compelled to undress. They were robbed of their hair and any valuables.

Naked prisoners were then driven along an innocuous looking fenced in ‘tube’ or

path that led to so-called ‘shower’ blocks. They were herded inside and

exterminated via the use of exhaust gases from tank engines. (The Nazi guards

cynically named the path “The Street to Heaven”.) Their corpses were then burned

on huge pyres. Hundreds of thousands of Jews plus some gypsies were disposed of in

this manner during the period July 1942 to October 1943. The testimonies of

survivors to these events and the cruel, disgusting behaviour of the SS and

Ukrainian guards are especially harrowing to read. This knowledge made the

execution of the painting an extremely disturbing experience for Walker. In the

painting, a cold eerie sunlight illuminates the empty path. No victims are depicted
because, as in reality, they are absent from the scene. Due to the curve of the path,

the entrances to the gas chambers are hidden, consequently the path’s destination

remains a mystery but can perhaps be guessed because paths are so often metaphors

for the journey of life and the culmination of that journey, we all know, is death.

Self-awareness of our own finitude, according to some theorists, means that

mourning-work is a lifelong process.

Absence of both people and buildings characterises the canvas ‘Hiroshima, 1945’

(2008), which records the effects of the ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb dropped on the

Japanese city on August 6th 1945 by the American air force.

Paradoxically, the atom bomb was both a tribute to the scientific and technological

achievements of humanity and a testimony to its cruelty and suicidal tendencies.

Tens of thousands of mainly civilians died - some immediately and some later from

injuries, burns and radiation poisoning - and most of the buildings in the city centre

were obliterated. Only a few structures remained standing (in a ruined state) and

among them was the Nagarekawa (Methodist) Church visible in the left foreground.

The painting’s high viewpoint and predominantly brown hue recalls van Gogh’s

1888 sepia ink drawing of the plain of La Crau seen from Mount Major in Provence

that Walker has written about as an art historian. (3) However, while the drawing

celebrates the fertility of the plain and the value of agricultural labour, the painting

mourns the loss of people and a thriving city. The bomb produced a ghastly

wasteland and inaugurated the age of nuclear weaponry that continues to threaten
the future of humankind. The German theorist Gene Ray. who has written some

illuminating essays on the theme of art and mourning in the work of Joseph Beuys

and others, has argued that the Holocaust and atomic bomb attacks were

‘qualitative’ acts of state violence because they changed ‘in an irreversible way our

understanding of humanity and its future prospects’. (4)

Unfortunately, the Nazi Holocaust did not prove to be the last genocide in human

history. Others have since occurred in Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur. ‘Victims of

the Khmer Rouge’ (2008) depicts the grief statue standing before the so-called ‘skull

map’, a map of Cambodia made from the skulls and bones of the victims of the

Khmer Rouge regime that was displayed in the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum,

Phoem Penh from 1979 to 2002 as a testimony to the atrocities committed by Maoist

ideologues under the leadership of Pol Pot. (Tuol Sleng was originally a high school

that became the main prison and torture centre of the Khmer Rouge.)
It has been calculated that 1.7 million Cambodians died during the period 1975-79

from starvation, overwork, execution and torture. Although the skull is a somewhat

tired and overused emblem of death in art, its multiplicity in the skull map renews

its potency.

‘Nine/Eleven’ and ‘Monument at Ground Zero’ (2007) both commemorate the

Islamist fundamentalist attacks on the World Trade Center towers, New York in

which around 3000 people were killed.

In both pictures the scale of the grief statue is uncertain - it could be as huge as the

Statue of Liberty, which it naturally evokes.

Walker was not in New York in 2001 and so both paintings were made using

photographs of the scenes of destruction. It is of course paradoxical that a

monument to 9/11 should be present while the attack on the twin towers is in

progress. While some New Yorkers walk their dogs by the water’s edge, flames and

smoke engulf the twin towers across the estuary. In the ‘Monument’ canvas the

iconography of ruins, dark palette and pictorial style recall the paintings of the

Sublime associated with Romanticism but also British war paintings from the First

and Second World Wars. Many monuments to 9/11 have been produced and more

are planned but few it seems are or are going to be as effective as the grief statue

depicted by Walker.

In ‘Esher, Surrey in the year 3000’ (2006) - the final canvas in a landscape series
about Esher - global climate change is presumed to have resulted in the end of

humanity and nature.

All that remains are clouds of brown dust swirling around the statue of grief,

graveyard crosses and headstones and dead trees. This vision of the future is

obviously extremely bleak and reflects Walker’s fear that it is already too late to

rescue the planet. If he is wrong, then the painting will serve the useful function of

acting as a dire warning. In ‘Oil wells on fire’ (2007) and ‘Waste Dump’ (2008) the

environmental theme is continued.

The setting depicted in the former canvas is the Kuwait desert after the departure of Iraq’s army in 1991. In

a needless, reckless and vindictive act of vandalism Saddam Hussein’s armed forces had set over 600 oil

wells on fire creating an appalling level of damage and pollution that took firefighters months of work to

rectify. This event was the result of a war of aggression but this image and ‘Waste Dump’ are also

emblematic of the industrial pollution that is taking place across the whole planet but especially in rapidly

developing industrial nations such as China and India.

Such pollution not only damages nature but also the health of humans.

‘Execution by Torture’ (2008) depicts the crucifixion of a Jewish religious prophet

and two thieves that took place in the Middle East during Roman times.
The Roman method of execution was a particularly cruel one but Walker eschews a

close up representation of the victims’ bodily agony in order to avoid the sadistic

voyeurism associated with so many images of violence. Viewed from a distance,

three wooden crosses are silhouetted against the sky. A stark rocky landscape, dark

purple in hue, illuminated by flashes of lightning is intended to convey

metaphorically a protest at the suffering experienced by all those who are tortured

to death. Walker is an atheist and therefore does not believe in Christ’s resurrection.

Nevertheless, he is moved by Christ’s passion and is sympathetic to many of his

teachings.

As James Todd Dubose has remarked: ‘A central task in all mourning is the

movement from private emoting and meaning-making to public and interpersonal

sharing of such experience.’ (5) This explains the purpose of Walker’s mourning-

work series. Gene Ray has rightly argued that human progress requires ‘radical

social transformation, a global reorganization aimed at neutralizing relations of

domination’ and that art’s power ‘to intervene into everyday life is extremely

limited’. However, what it can do is prompt critical reflection on the part of viewers

and enable them to confront unpalatable truths about human society and history.

He concludes that ‘art and culture can make modest but real contributions to a

collectivised labour of mourning and transformation’ and that ‘every form of

criticality … is welcome as a needed contribution toward cumulative shifts in public

awareness and consciousness’. (6)

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(1) Freud, Sigmund, ‘Mourning and Melancholia,’ in The Standard Edition of the

Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited and translated by James

Strachey, Vol. 14. 1917. (Reprint, London: Hogarth, 1957).

(2) Personifications of abstract ideas such as liberty and victory by means of female

rather than male figures has a long history in Western art and culture. The gender

bias is thought to derive from the feminine gender of abstract nouns of virtue in

many Indo-European languages. This issue is discussed by Marina Warner in

Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, (London: Wiedenfeld &

Nicolson, 1985). There also seems to have been a division of labour regarding the

emotions in society - women have been thought of as expressing grief in public more

than men. Sorrowful female figures became very popular as additions to tombs and
graves in nineteenth century cemeteries especially those in Paris. The photographer

David Robinson calls them ‘saving graces’ and has documented many examples; see

his book Saving Graces: Images of Women in European Cemeteries, (New York &

London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1995).

(3) ‘Van Gogh’s drawing of La Crau from Mont Majour’, Master Drawings, 20 (4)

winter 1982, pp. 380-85, plus plate 18.

(4) Gene Ray, ‘Mourning and Cosmopolitics: Joseph Beuys in context’, (2007),

http://www.linksnet.de/artikel.php?id=3297

(5) Dubose, James Todd, Mourning, evil and grace a hermeneutical-

phenomenological approach, (Dissertation: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Duquesne University,

2004.) p. 123.

(6) Op. cit.