His Most Famous Painting (The Walk Home) – Julian Schnabel
American painter, sculptor and filmmaker, Julian Schnabel (born 1951) is a household name in Hollywood who has also been a favorite of ‘neo-expressionism’. He entered the field of art through his first solo exhibition in 1975, when painting as art was losing its luster. Schnabel is known for his overly assertive ways of self-promotion, often to the ire of art critics and admirers. His painting style is full of cheek, provocation and raw force of expression. Schnabel’s masterpiece “The Walk Home” remains the most significant corroborator of his indisputable authority on “modern expressionist” art.
“The Walk Home” is a large piece, 9’3 “X 19’4” in dimension, created during 1984-85, and is currently on display at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. This painting beautifully carries the distinctive elements of the resurrected art of painting in the form of defiant ‘abstractionism’, where artists refuse to limit their works to pure paintings on flat canvas. In reality, “The Walk Home” is an ‘abstract’ work set in various mediums, such as broken pieces of tableware, metals such as bronze and copper, fiberglass pieces and oil paintings, on a wooden base. This work represents a mixture of mosaic, painting, and minor relief work as a revolutionary practice in an otherwise serious art of painting. According to most sects of ‘Modern Art’, “The Walk Home” also focuses more on the technique of presentation, than simply a thematic expression.
Modern artists discard the concept of uniqueness of the meaning of a work of art and prefer to keep it open to different sectors of admirers to interpret the meaning in their own way. The theme of Julian’s “The Walk Home” is believed to center on the fable of a king who was attacked by unknown assailants, who hid waiting, on his way home. Arguably, indirectly, it symbolizes the artist’s resentment against the conventional landscape of art, where each new movement of artistic interpretation has tried to cannibalize its previous generation. It also reflects the bewilderment of an artist, amid the haze of the “postmodern” art scene, identifying the way back to where they belong. The bold color scheme and thick brush strokes, an embodiment of thick trapped energy and overflowing emotions over a variety of random mediums, add to the rendering’s dramatic appeal, calling it one of the masterpieces of modern creativity.