lesliePARKE
EVERYTHING IS REAL paintings by
lesliePARKE
introduction by Christopher Millis notes by Leslie Parke
INTRODUCTION Little do I remember of the astronomy lecture I attended twenty some years ago on a warm summer night in an observatory on what may be the last densely wooded tract of land in Cambridge. What I do remember is that the lecture put me in a kind of swoon. For the first time in my life, science and poetry became one. Somehow a talk on chaos theory and its relation to the order of the universe—randomness as the predictable and necessary precursor to design—had the heft and elegance and perspicacity of a poem you want to memorize or a painting you don’t want to leave. Leslie Parke’s paintings live at the same intersection where patterns court chaos, abstraction approaches the figurative and stasis hovers on the cusp of implosion. Her paintings are charged by contradictions: impersonal grids softened by sunlight; watery washes with metallic spikes; a cathedral of squiggles above a perfectly triangular black hole; the aurora borealis in a zip lock bag. But even contradictions are connected by themes, and what’s most striking across these disparate, spirited works is their relentless energy. This is a painter who thrashes in her sleep. And it is not merely high-powered kinesis that comes through so much as the integration of movement, color and form. It is no coincidence that the lines of “Silo” shift from vertical on the left half of the diptych to horizontal on the right; those same lines correspond with the play of light—muted to the left, increasingly luminous as the eye moves right. For all that it initially appears purely cerebral—the meticulous study of an industrial grid—the painting as a whole achieves the thrilling solace of a sunrise. As with many artists at their performance peaks, Parke’s recent paintings seem deceptively effortless. They’re not. Go back to them; they have a lot to say.
Christopher Millis Cambridge, MA
LESLIE PARKE NOTES EVERYTHING IS REAL is a group of paintings that are both abstract and representational. Each image in the series exists in the real world—an old board of insulation, an industrial garage door, a silo and corncrib, a track in the mud and wrapped cargo on pallets. At the same time, each has been composed to accentuate the inherently abstract qualities of the reflective surfaces and their interplay with light. I started my career as an abstract painter, sometimes making non-objective images and at others deconstructing the work of earlier masters, such as Ingres, Matisse and Giotto. Then in the 1990s I received a grant to spend half a year at the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, where I had a studio and 24 hour access to the Monet’s garden. At first, I looked for anything abstract; the structure, the color—but in the end, I was seduced by the light. Since that time, I have been in search of the subject matter that would resonate best with this full range of interests. I have painted many things from nature in the past, and even some traditional still lifes, but I’ve never completely related to those traditional genres. It wasn’t until I stumbled onto a waterfront dock piled high with pallets of cargo wrapped in plastic that I felt I’d finally found my subject. This shiny, transparent, and translucent stuff, which reflected light and held water bubbles from the rain, had all the qualities I was searching for. The subject is completely abstract, and yet has a surface as complex and difficult to paint as one of Ingres’ satin dresses. At last, all the elements I’ve worked on separately over the years have come together in these new paintings and I can see a way forward. Everything is real; every crease exists in the object, every reflection. And yet . . .
Fritos Bag, 16 inches x 16 inches, oil on linen, 2011
Wrapped Fence, 40 inches x 72 inches, oil on canvas, 2013
Wrapped Sacks, 40 inches x 72 inches, oil on canvas, 2013
Road Work, 56 inches x 43.5 inches, oil on canvas, 2014
Insulation Board, 46 inches x 56 inches, oil on canvas, 2014
Leaning Insulation Boards, 60 inches x 40 inches, oil on canvas, 2014
Pool Chemicals, 40 inches x 60 inches, oil on canvas, 2014
Silo, 46 inches x 94 inches, oil on canvas, 2014
Re-Kleined, 36 inches x 72 inches, diptych, oil on canvas, 2013
Tarp Two, 60 inches x 48 inches, oil on canvas, 2013
Silver Triptych, 44 inches x 90 inches, oil on canvas, 2012
Mylar, 60 inches x 70 inches, oil on canvas, 2015
Shore Rock, 46 inches x 46 inches, oil, glass, metal on canvas, 2015
Wrapped Crates, 40 inches x 60 inches, oil on canvas, 2012
Wrapped Blue, 40 inches, x 72 inches, oil on canvas, 2014
Winter Lines, 46 inches x 56 inches, oil and glass on canvas, 2014
River Bridge, 40 inches x 72 inches, oil on canvas, 2015
Battenkill Morning, 46 inches x 82 inches, oil on canvas, 2014
Almond Tree Springs, 67 inches x 90 inches, oil on canvas, 2015
Almond Tree Evening, 66 inches x 96 inches, oil on canvas, 2015
Photographs of paintings by Jonathan Barber Book design by Carol Jessop Copyright Š 2015 Leslie Parke All rights reserved
ANDREW CICCARELLI
Leslie Parke, a painter from upstate New York, is a recipient of the Esther and Adolph Gottlieb Grant for Individual Support, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest grant as artist-inresidence at the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France, and the George Sugarman Foundation Grant, among others. Her exhibits include the Williams College Museum of Art, the Museum of the Southwest, Midland, Texas, the Fernbank Museum in Atlanta, Georgia, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Parke has a BA and MA from Bennington College. Her work is in numerous corporate and private collections.