The Darling River - near Capon shearing shed

John R Walker works close to his home in the town of Braidwood, on the Southern Tablelands of New South Wales. The act of drawing is a form of thinking for Walker, and a way to make sense of his world. His drawings describe a narrative of experience: what it is to take a walk through a particular site in the bush, along a ridge, or down a road, rather than trying to capture a conventional ‘scene’.

Walker is attracted to the boundaries and borders that mark and define the landscape – points of transition including natural divides like gullies and creeks, and constructed ones, such as roads and fence lines. He finds traces of activity, both Indigenous and European, everywhere in the landscape.

Walker uses mediums that enable him to work quickly, such as gouache or ink applied with a brush or pen directly onto a sheet of paper or sketchbook page. While the gouache takes on the forms of the things he is depicting, the landscape’s open vistas and far horizons are echoed in Walker’s use of negative space in the untouched surface of the paper and his notational mark-making.