For most of his life, Laurel resident James Walker didn’t make much of being Jackson Pollock’s cousin.
He was an artist himself, after all.
For decades in Denver, Walker ran a neighborhood art gallery where he showed his own paintings and the work of friends. He raised his daughter there. He did commercial art and interior design. He painted houses and bathrooms, hung drywall and took commissions. His connection to one of the 20th century’s most famous American painters was something he generally kept to himself.
Every once in a while though, he found it amusing to spring the news on an unsuspecting client.
“Jackson Pollock’s cousin just painted your bathroom.”
They didn’t always believe him.
“It just didn’t make sense to a lot of people,” Walker said last month over lunch at Little Fish.
Today, the connection he once barely mentioned has become an improbable center of his life.
Walker, who lives quietly in a small home on Peconic Bay Blvd., is now the manager of services at the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center in Springs, where he began as a docent in 2019. There, he brings Pollock and Lee Krasner to life — two towering figures of postwar American art who did some of their greatest work in East Hampton.
He presents them as artists and complicated human beings, with an intimacy drawn from his own life as a painter and his family connection to Pollock.
On a recent tour, Walker’s style was clear from the start. Before launching into Pollock and Krasner, he asked visitors where they had come from, what brought them to the house and whether they made art themselves. The questions turned what could have been a lecture into a conversation.
Later, standing in the small upstairs room that had been Pollock’s first East End studio, Walker asked his visitors to imagine what arriving in Springs in 1945 must have felt like for the couple, after living and working in crowded New York City apartments. “The pollution, the air, the noise, everything about it,” he said. Suddenly, Pollock was looking out a pair of windows from his second floor studio onto Accabonac Creek.
“It would start to change anybody.”
Pollock had spent years in New York City, searching for his artistic voice. In Springs, his art broke wide open, producing the revolutionary paintings that would make him an icon of abstract expressionism.
This fall is shaping up as an unusually busy period for Walker, with Pollock- and Krasner-related exhibitions and openings on the horizon, a dance project he has been asked to help introduce and an unexpected ad project incorporating images of his own paintings. It is another burst of activity in a life that, since Walker arrived on the East End in 2018, has been marked by a series of truly colorful coincidences.
“It’s completely magical,” he said.
‘Not interested’
None of this was the plan. Walker didn’t move east to capitalize on the Pollock name. He didn’t move here to work at the Pollock-Krasner House. In fact, when he first visited the East End decades ago, despite knowing perfectly well that Pollock had lived and worked here, Walker said he wasn’t interested in visiting the place.
“Not interested in the slightest.”
What drew him east was something simpler. He wanted to paint.
About 40 years ago, Walker set out from Colorado in a Volkswagen with his young daughter, Courtney, bound for a wedding in Greenwich, Connecticut. A friend there suggested that he and his daughter continue out to Long Island and see the Hamptons, which they did.
Walker took photos during the trip and later, back in Colorado, made a painting from one of them. A friend named Jeremy kept seeing the work taking shape in Walker’s basement.
“That’s the best painting I’ve ever seen you do,” Walker remembers Jeremy telling him. “You need to go to the Hamptons.”
So Walker returned east, stayed with friends and photographed the landscape. Back out West, he produced a series of paintings from the trip. The seed had been planted.
“I’ve quite seriously wanted to move here ever since,” Walker said.
Walker had built a good life in Denver, and he loved his art gallery. But the business of making a living increasingly interfered with the reason he had become an artist in the first place. He wasn’t painting enough.
In 2014 or 2015, Walker began seriously looking east. He made trips to Long Island and followed real estate listings from Colorado. He dearly wanted the East End’s light, and he wanted his time back.
“I have to get back to my painting,” he told a friend in Denver. “And the only way for me to do that is for me to leave here.”
People thought he was crazy. Walker was closing a gallery, leaving behind decades of friendships and moving across the country to a place where he barely knew anyone. He went anyway.
‘One crazy thing after another’
In 2018, after years of looking, the pieces started falling into place. Walker found a house in Laurel online. His own house had to sell first, and properties he watched on Long Island kept disappearing before he could act. But this one remained. Two previous deals on it had already fallen through.
When Walker asked the lawyer handling his purchase whether he was making a good decision, she lowered her glasses and said something he still remembers.
“This house was so meant to be yours,” she told him. “I’ve never had anything come together so quickly.”
Walker had been prepared to paint in a basement when he moved east, as he had when his daughter was young. But the Laurel house had an upper floor with a half wall overlooking the staircase and a skylight above it. The entire top floor could be his studio. Walker and the real estate agent stood there staring.
“I cannot believe what’s going on,” he said.
Soon after moving in, Walker received a commission from former Colorado clients building a contemporary home north of Boulder. They wanted a painting measuring 5 feet by 5 feet.
But the easel Walker had brought from Denver could not handle a canvas that large. He began improvising ways to prop the painting against the half wall upstairs. Then, while putting boxes into the rafters of his otherwise empty garage, he noticed some boards on a top shelf that had been left behind. Walker pulled them down.
It was a six-foot easel. To Walker, it felt as if the house had been waiting for him.
“It has been like that ever since I got here,” Walker said, with a broad grin. “One crazy thing after another.”
A chance encounter
The strangest twist involved the Pollock-Krassner House, the place Walker had not moved east to be part of at all.
Pollock was not some distant name in Walker’s family history. His grandmother was Pollock’s aunt, and he had spent key stretches of his childhood living with his grandparents. He knew the family and its stories well, but rarely traded on that connection.
While Walker was still house hunting, he visited the Pollock-Krassner House and introduced himself to the director, who at first didn’t believe him when he told her who he was. Then one day, driving past the house, he spotted three people outside that he recognized.
They were Denver friends, regular visitors to his gallery who lived just a couple of blocks away from it. Walker turned his car around and went inside.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he asked an old friend.
She essentially asked him the same thing. Walker explained that he was looking for a house and planned to move to New York. They got to talking and he told her something she had never known, despite years of visiting his Denver gallery.
“I’m a cousin of Jackson Pollock,” he said.
Her response stunned him.
As a little girl, she told Walker, she had been riding in a car with her parents in East Hampton when they came upon the scene of the 1956 car crash on Springs Fireplace Rd. in which Pollock died.
Two people who had known each other for years in Denver had each carried a deeply personal connection to Pollock without the other knowing it, only to discover it inside the artist’s home in Springs.
After Walker finally moved east, he returned to Springs and sat on a bench overlooking the property toward Accabonac Creek. He had been rethinking his initial intentions to keep a distance from his famous cousin’s legacy.
“Some way, somehow, I’ve got to spend some time here,” he thought.
The next day, an email arrived from the director. Would he like to become a docent?
‘A step forward’
Walker began giving tours in 2019. At first, he was hesitant to tell visitors about his family connection. He was even reluctant to tell them that he was an artist himself.
Over time, he developed ways of revealing the connection depending on the group in front of him. His tours are not scripted. He reads the room, engages his visitors and takes it from there. Sometimes he doesn’t mention the family connection at all. Sometimes he has fun with it.
Once, an especially outspoken visitor began describing Pollock’s mother, Stella, as controlling and ticking off a list of pointed opinions about her personality.
Walker listened patiently.
“Plus, she was my aunt,” he finally told her.
The woman turned bright red. He let her off the hook.
“You were right about everything you said.”
Walker’s tours focus more on Pollock’s art than his mythology. He tries to move beyond the familiar caricatures and moral judgments surrounding Pollock and Krasner and instead explain how two enormously complicated people influenced one another.
“The outcome is their art,” he said.
Walker gives tours Thursday through Sunday during the season. His life as James Walker the artist and James Walker the Pollock relative – identities he once kept almost entirely separate – have gradually converged.
‘I love my house’
Walker is heading into an especially busy stretch, including the dance project “Uncaged,” for which he has been asked to serve on a committee and introduce the performance when it opens at LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton. Other Pollock- and Krasner-related events are approaching, including a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art examining their work side by side. At the same time, another unexpected opportunity has emerged involving Walker’s own paintings being used for an advertisement in which he’ll be featured.
For a man who sees himself as anything but public, the new attention can seem almost absurd. Walker contends that it’s part of the same strange current that carried him from Denver to Laurel.
“When I got here,” he said, “it was like coming home to a place I’ve never been.”
The curious signs haven’t stopped. A couple months ago, Walker took his Audi
in for service. He had bought the car in Denver. At the dealership, an employee
looked up its vehicle identification number and discovered where the car had
originally come from.
East Hampton.
Walker laughed at that one. “It’s goofy,” he said.
For all the remarkable coincidences surrounding his move east, Walker’s daily life in
Laurel remains decidedly ordinary. He doesn’t spend much time at restaurants
or East End events. He cooks for himself. He listens to music and watches the
Yankees. He mows his own lawn, pulls his own weeds and shovels his own
driveway.
And upstairs is the studio. His painting schedule has fallen into a rhythm that reminds him of when he was raising Courtney. Back then, summers revolved around his daughter and winter meant returning more seriously to his work.
Now summers are consumed by the yard and four days a week in Springs. When the Pollock-Krasner House closes for the season at the end of October, Walker retreats upstairs and paints.
“I love my house,” he said.
Walker did not come east looking for Pollock. He came looking for himself. But, gradually, the family history he had carried so quietly for most of his life found a purpose.
