Initially presented in the ambitious travelling exhibition, Other Worlds, organized by Dalhousie Art Gallery, Douglas Walker’s painting, Untitled (A-784 ‘Wave’), envelops the gallery in a sea of blue for our summer exhibition. Spanning over thirty feet, Walker’s monumental painting of cresting waves is emblematic of his decades-long approach synthesizing modalities in historical image-making (here the references include Delft, ukiyo-e) with surface treatments that are evolved from contemporary experiments with different media (oil and water, craquelure). Walker’s innovations to building scale in the work introduced the grid, with a series of tiled panes that, while resolving a practical challenge, forged a layered alignment with his references to Delft pottery and ukiyo-e artist Hokusai’s play with perspective. Across Walker’s work, whether he is taking as subject images of nature, culture, industry or the built environment, he conveys systems of  interconnectedness, with time similarly invoked as a kind of connective tissue, yet his immense renderings of familiar forms, such as the wave, which edges closer to actual scale by his hand, nevertheless persist as impossible, fantastic, otherworldly.