Classical art has long been vaunted for its geometries — how its inherent ratios, angles and symmetries create a steady, pleasing stability. While employing similar forms, Sarah Walker’s mathy shapes do nothing of the sort. She builds her intricate paintings with layers of fluid acrylic paint, letting colors flow freely before corralling them within careful delineations. She covers some areas but always retains a trace of an earlier layer, even when, she wrote in an email, the painting isn’t coming together yet and, using a green dish pad, she “will scour the surface like an angry god.”
That energy pulses through her intensely vivid compositions. Some works look almost pre-Columbian, such as “Notes to Self,” which resembles the face of an ancient fish god carved from malachite. By contrast, “Interspecies I” reads as sci-fi, its radiating forms and a gem-tone palette like a mothership designed by Versace. “Shimmer Portal” seems to float with a mandala-like spiritual quality, asking the viewer whether abstract patterns and shapes can contain a life of their own.
‘Sarah Walker: Radiant Bodies’ On view through November 13 at Hexum Gallery in Montpelier. Closing reception Friday, November 6, 4-8 p.m.
This article appears in November 4 • 2026.
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