Tuscan Bells, oil on panel

David Walsh finds his main source of artistic inspiration in the habitations of man. In his Venice paintings, particularly, the picture space is virtually filled by facades of one sort or another. The narrow range of colors and their careful repetition over most of the canvas draws the composition forward and inward, creating a humanized space so compressed as to become at times claustrophobic.

Yet it is a space which, despite the many evidences of their presence, is unaccountably lacking in humans. The anomaly of their absence conveys a mood of loneliness and mystery which we may feel is not, despite the dramatic differences in style, altogether unlike that of the American Realist Edward Hopper. In Walsh's paintings, we see only surfaces; the lives that inhabit these walls are impenetrable.

French Garden , oil on panel, 9" x 12"

This theme is given explicit treatment in Walsh's salt marsh paintings, where the old house with its intricate veranda - and its memories of another time - has no perceptible means of access. The sense of the past is a consistent presence in Walsh's work. His compositions force our eyes to wander over the surface of walls and roofs, and as they do so, we become aware of the process of accretion in time. We glimpse this in architectural inconsistencies or in the points of surface disrepair, where patches of missing stucco reveal earlier facades. In his focus upon the accumulation of styles and materials which make up the habitation, the artist subtly calls attention to a temporal dimension beyond that of its current occupants. And this is a theme uniquely supported by the painter's technique. The painted surface, much like the buildings depicted, is the product of layering - here the layering of transparent glazes - which gives Walsh's colors a resonance and luminosity that we associate with the earlier style of the Academies.

A Medievalist by trade and an internationally known expert in Romanesque architecture, Walsh is a Professor of Art History and History at the University of Rochester. He is Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Great Britain and has won awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Philosophical Society. His work is in the collections of the Bordesley Abbey Museum, the Musée Ochier, and the Butler Art Institute.