Walter Markham

	Fiction Non-Fiction Poetry Film Art MEB Authors Events Distribution Booksense Contacts	Walter Markham link to international art listing link to www.hogarcollection.com Graphite by Walter Markham stati-graphic prints of graphite drawing series One aspect of thinking in totality, no matter the topic or enterprise, involves the notion or experience of solitariness. Loneliness, or solo experienced time and space. In Walter Markham’s series of Brush and ink pieces there is an attempt to capture solitary perception and reflection. Water delineates the space that the ink is given to. There is an act at the outset of giving and taking, of loaded brush to water where experience runs wild, or runs as wild as water (water, the most common element of this world that we inhabit.) But that wild experience, that wild reflexive experience is surrounded by dry paper, by a rigid boundary or line defining the graphic. It is this constrictive apprehension of space that is at the same time always containing and yet liberating the graphic medium. These simple brush and ink drawings are actually a rendition of mind, as I suppose most viewers would reminisce through old eastern brush and ink landscapes and like gestural evocations. But they have a kind of empirical, scientific quality about them too. I suppose that certain additions to their series might begin to reveal such elemental permutations and repetitions recognizable as the atomic building blocks of our language and the world and what goes into it: i.e., sky, trees, sun, moon, leaf, flower, animal and so forth. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, wanted to get to the root properties of mind in order to find where reason begins. Among other things NOT related to the mind, he did come to realize that the kernals of time and space were GIVEN to us when we entered the human form. Time and space, the most elemental of all building blocks are, according to Kant’s Critique, really just a priori properties of the mind itself. Using this as a sort of metaphor of human history and development we could say that the Age of Reason, per se, the Age of Enlightenment, that time when human habitation began to crawl forth from organizations not driven solely by blind belief, was really an encounter with the properties of the human mind itself. This encounter with human experience not filtered through belief or assumptive networks outside the individual is really the entire pictorial plane of Walter Markham’s brush and ink series. Each brush placement is a closing in upon the totality of the individual mind, of the mind held up to dry space. There is a recording of thought here, much like words scratched out in time to a poetical inspiration. But how can this totality have been captured? By realizing that fantasia of the mind IS the totality of the mind; the artist ingeniously separated, with natural boundary, what is from what is not. In the separation of black and white a gray matter was allowed to rule the graphic rendition of brush and ink, bleeding all that is seen on the paper through the channel of individual experience. Tod Thilleman, read at KGB Bar December 2, 2004.

One aspect of thinking in totality, no matter the topic or enterprise, involves the notion or experience of solitariness. Loneliness, or solo experienced time and space. In Walter Markham’s series of Brush and ink pieces there is an attempt to capture solitary perception and reflection. Water delineates the space that the ink is given to. There is an act at the outset of giving and taking, of loaded brush to water where experience runs wild, or runs as wild as water (water, the most common element of this world that we inhabit.) But that wild experience, that wild reflexive experience is surrounded by dry paper, by a rigid boundary or line defining the graphic. It is this constrictive apprehension of space that is at the same time always containing and yet liberating the graphic medium. These simple brush and ink drawings are actually a rendition of mind, as I suppose most viewers would reminisce through old eastern brush and ink landscapes and like gestural evocations. But they have a kind of empirical, scientific quality about them too. I suppose that certain additions to their series might begin to reveal such elemental permutations and repetitions recognizable as the atomic building blocks of our language and the world and what goes into it: i.e., sky, trees, sun, moon, leaf, flower, animal and so forth. Immanuel Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, wanted to get to the root properties of mind in order to find where reason begins. Among other things NOT related to the mind, he did come to realize that the kernals of time and space were GIVEN to us when we entered the human form. Time and space, the most elemental of all building blocks are, according to Kant’s Critique, really just a priori properties of the mind itself. Using this as a sort of metaphor of human history and development we could say that the Age of Reason, per se, the Age of Enlightenment, that time when human habitation began to crawl forth from organizations not driven solely by blind belief, was really an encounter with the properties of the human mind itself. This encounter with human experience not filtered through belief or assumptive networks outside the individual is really the entire pictorial plane of Walter Markham’s brush and ink series. Each brush placement is a closing in upon the totality of the individual mind, of the mind held up to dry space. There is a recording of thought here, much like words scratched out in time to a poetical inspiration. But how can this totality have been captured? By realizing that fantasia of the mind IS the totality of the mind; the artist ingeniously separated, with natural boundary, what is from what is not. In the separation of black and white a gray matter was allowed to rule the graphic rendition of brush and ink, bleeding all that is seen on the paper through the channel of individual experience. Tod Thilleman, read at KGB Bar December 2, 2004.