'Marriage of the verbal and the visual ' (1975) Oil on canvas, 122 x 122 cm

This painting was the result of an interest in the relations between words and images, the Conceptual art of the 1960s and 1970s (with its stress on language), semiotics (the science of signs), diagrams and a critique of the formalist theory of art. In the mid-1970s John A. Walker produced a series of paintings focusing upon the colour orange. The first consisted of a square canvas divided into three horizontal bands. In the top band was the word 'orange' painted in white on a black ground; in the middle band was a flat expanse of cadmium orange taken straight from the tube; in the bottom band was the word 'orange' painted in orange pigment on a grey ground. (Some degree of optical flicker resulted from this contrast.) Scanning down, the viewer encountered the English name or concept for a familiar colour, then the percept or exemplification of that colour, and then, at the bottom, the unity of concept and percept. (Work is in the collection of the Wolverhampton Art Gallery.)