Jason Walker is a talented painter, designer, animator and artist, who was born in Nairn, Scotland and currently lives and works in Montreal. Walker moved to Canada in 1990, where he set up studio as a professional portrait painter. Since that time he has painted the portraits of various celebrities and individuals including the portrait of Wayne Gretzky for his induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame and won an American Society of Portrait Artist's award in 1998. I am a painter who prefers the work to speak for itself. I believe that the relationship between the painting and the viewer is one that benefits from intimacy, without voice-over. It is as Duchamp says: “the viewer completes the work.” Although photography has taken over many of the duties of contemporary portraiture I obviously prefer the painted subject. To paint the sitter is to have an intense encounter with that image and with art history at the same time. I often work from photographs (as well as from the model) but photography interests me only as aid to memory. I work in oil on linen and have chosen to concentrate on the single figure. I invest each image with significant detail and try to achieve not simply a physical likeness but also to unveil a psychological truth: to show a state of being in the world.
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