Bad Painting Series

Like most artists, Bill Walmsley worked in different media throughout his career. He had a “Bad Drawing” series and a “Bad Painting” series, such as this wonderfully exuberant painting from 1964.

Walmsley has an artist’s skepticism and an artist’s strength regarding critical opinion: “You always get critics...I do think they are good, but they...don’t always know everything. You have to think for yourself. They don’t like to be told they don’t know everything. You don’t know everything. I don’t know everything...and I judge my own faults or badness or goodness. I don’t let them do it for me.” For this philosophical position, he had had empirical evidence: "I’ve done well in the print world. Shows, prizes---but I could get the same print that I’d won an award on in one show thrown out at another show. No two critics, no two jurors are the same. So you learn that you have to think for yourself when you are a printmaker, or a painter....Back when I was an Abstract Expressionist painter, in the fifties, I remember a lot of shows where the Abstract Expressionist juror or director would throw out all the realism, and, of course, a lot of realist painters back then were good. Hopper was upset, and he was probably one of the strongest landscape painters of this century.  Hopper was a damn good painter, a lot better than a lot of those Abstract Expressionist late-comers, or whatever you want to call them. I see him with the other Americans---they just paint---Hopper is beyond painting. But there are good paintings on both sides, so I criticize [students’] paintings from several different view points. I don’t give ’em one. And the student has to think it through, again. He has to develop it, himself.”