Walker, Anne, 1933-....

Anne Walker is a printmaker and painter; she lives in Paris. Walker was born in 1933 in Boston, Massachusetts, and graduated in 1955 from Smith College; she spent her junior year in Paris, working at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse. In 1956 she returned to Paris to study with Johnny Friedlaender at his atelier; her first etchings were done there. She has continued to make prints, created etchings, and a number of fine-press books. Walker's graphic work has been exhibited worldwide since 1956 and is in public and private collections in Europe and the United States. Her husband, Bertrand Dorny, is also an artist.

In 1986 she took up painting, using gouache combined with pastel, a technique that has predominated in her work since then. With these materials she began exploring the format of the artist's book, which has allowed her to collaborate with poets and writers whom she admires-Michel Butor, Kenneth Koch and Peter Davison, to name a few. Much of her book work is concerned with the language of color and is characterized by a lyricism-sometimes playful, sometimes elegiac-that pairs well with literature.

Anne Walker has written the following about her artists' books:

“I believe the desire to create images originates in an early passion for pictures and paintings. Some of my fondest memories are of my illustrated childhood books, read over and over again, as much for the pictures as for the words. My dream then was to be an illustrator of children's books. Growing up in the Newton suburbs outside of Boston, where I was born, I was close to the Museum of Fine Arts, where I was enrolled in a Saturday morning art class by parents who always encouraged my interest in drawing, but I soon stopped attending in order to roam the more interesting museum. It was a wonderful introduction to seeing: having little knowledge of art history, I was free to admire or dislike as I wandered. The Oriental art rooms particularly impressed me.”

“Attending Smith College as a studio art major and taking my junior year abroad in Paris, where I was first exposed directly to the many forms of contemporary art, were essential in forming my vision as an artist. My first experiments were with printing techniques. I studied woodcutting at Smith with Seong Moy and etching with Johnny Friedlaender in Paris. Having taken up residence in Paris permanently, I could avail myself of the fine presses and printing studios to make numerous etchings and, most important, my first artist's books. These were made in collaboration with my poet friend Edward Kessler. Later, when I turned to using gouache and pastel, I began the series of 'painted books' which I continue to this day.”

“When conceiving a book, I work in harmony with writers whom I know personally, both French and American. Also, words of certain departed poets who speak to me across time can stimulate the visual pattern behind a composition. It is a question of words evoking images or, in direct collaboration with a poet, images evoking words. Because creatively I'm devoted to inventing landscape equivalences, the accordion form of 'folded paintings' suits my concept of an overall, amost unending piece that becomes a book when folded and can be read page by page, but that can also be viewed as a long picture, like a scroll. In my books I seek to illuminate rather than to illustrate the text, which the author inscribes after I've made the painting. If the poet is no longer living, I print the text myself in simple block letters. The words in the books are placed over and within the painting becoming inseparable from it, a form of intermingling that I try to render among the elements in the accompanying image.”

From the guide to the Anne Walker Artists' Book Collection MS 114., 1974-2006, (Mortimer Rare Book Room)