Katie Walker, Map of Self-Portrait, acrylic on canvas, 2013, Greenville County Museum of Art

Katie Walker is a local painter with a small show at the Greenville County Museum of Art. She was last year’s winner of Flat Out Under Pressure and had a booth at Artisphere. I’ve seen her stuff around.

It immediately grabs me.

I’m a color and design freak. Well-tuned colors composed in smart arrangements often capture my eye before my brain kicks in to register any kind of recognition. I can like something visually before I know what it is. Katie Walker’s stuff grabs me like that.

Her pieces are abstract, bright, playful, even humorous. They invite curiosity and exploration like old-fashioned game boards begging discovery and play or—to use a word common to many of her titles—“maps” that need investigation. To be clear, her paintings don’t necessarily look like game boards or maps but there’s an almost child-like attitude of wonder and expectation. Let’s see what happens if this kind of mark is made or these colors are splashed against these colors. What if this shape is set against these squiggles or hash marks? Just looking at them I get caught up in the process.

Katie Walker, Calculation XX, 2012, acrylic on canvas, Greenville County Museum of Art

One of my favorites in the show is“Words I Like”. It’s a large horizontal painting composed of arranged square-ish rectangles washed in shades of pale tan. Across the top is a large swash of pale yellow. A single ochre-colored arc stretches across the top half of the painting. It rests on a row of 3 black rectangles of various widths. Lists of words in neat white pencil script are written on each black rectangle. These black rectangles sit on a wide tan and brown shape with “legs” at the left and right edges of the canvas. The effect, for me at least, is of sitting in a sunlit elementary school classroom looking up at the blackboard. It evokes those rare moments in that remembered situation when learning became self-discovery and my world opened up.

But there’s nothing childish about Katie Walker’s work. This is serious play. Hers is thoughtful stuff that delights and intrigues.