​J Michael Walker

Nothing has so impacted my life as being invited, in 1974, to the Sierra Tarahumara mountains of northern México, to illustrate the first textbook in the natives’ language. This convergence of good fortune and divine providence that led me to that remote village of Sisoguichi grounded me in the languages, cultures, and spiritualities of the people and their land, and introduced me to the extraordinary, delightful, and lovely young lady who became and remains my wife, Nohemí (Mimí).

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There my heart opened up to the enormous sky and its Rembrandtian light; to the interwoven layers of cultures, mythologies, and histories; and to the most profoundly beautiful people I had yet encountered. I sensed at once that I had truly come home.

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Around this same time, I bought my first set of colored pencils and began teaching myself to draw. The relative isolation of la Sierra afforded me both the time and space to intuit style and technique. The Mexica spirit world and the miraculous world of 16th and 17th century Mexican painting flowed into my knowledge of European medieval and Gothic art; and the uniting of these worlds – the Flemish Primitives, the Mexican Virreinal, and illuminated manuscripts of the pre-Renaissance – came to inform my drawing;

while my life experiences in the rural world of la Sierra and in the multicultural community of Los Angeles (where I now reside) continually reawaken my sense of the “secular divine,” inspiring me to address the compelling social issues that have ever troubled me since my childhood in the segregated South.

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Drawing and painting are spiritual acts for me, divine links to the shadows and premonitions of our travails and ecstasies; my ongoing conversation with our native earth, its and our hidden beauty, and the unslaked greed and willful blindness that both threaten them and find them threatening.

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