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IN NEW YORK
New Paintings by
JOHN A. PARKS
532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel New York
All images ©2015 John A. Parks
Painting New York
©2015 John A. Parks
All Rights Reserved
Cover: Shake Shack Line, Madison Square Park. (detail) 2014, Oil on Linen 30” x 42”
IN NEW YORK
New Paintings by
JOHN A. PARKS
March 26 - April 23, 2015
532 GALLERY THOMAS JAECKEL
532 West 25TH STREET NEW YORK 10001
Painting New York
Even though I’ve lived in and around New York for more than thirty years I am still acutely aware that it is not my
native city. It has made me leery of painting it. The outsider tends to see the heroic in New York, the grandeur,
power and physicality of its buildings, the glint of hard yellow light on granite and quartz. And then the sheer energy of the place with its seething crowds, its improbable mish-mash of races and cultures, its tireless movement
and noise, can seem so extreme as to lie beyond the possibility of painting at all. Others have tried. George Bellows probably did it best in some of his early paintings of lower Manhattan where the power of his brushing and
the almost brutal strength of his line succeeded in conjuring up a sense of both mass and movement. John Sloan,
Reginald Marsh and Isabel Bishop also took on the raw life of the place and its denizens. But this impetus has
long since died away.
My own adventure in painting New York began two years ago with a conversation I had with Thomas Jaeckel,
my art dealer and friend, following a successful exhibition of works I had made about my English childhood. He
remarked that the things I was painting about happened a long time ago in a place far away. Why, he asked, was
I not interested in making paintings that addressed my present life? At first I dismissed the idea, but it refused to
go away.
I began to think about my life in New York.
I lived for years on West End Avenue in a cavernous and dark ground floor apartment serenaded by passing fire
trucks and the noise of the lobby. I painted all day in the front room in sepulchral light watching the soot settle
onto my work, stifled by the ancient steam heat system. In the evenings my wife and I ate in Chinese restaurants
on upper Broadway in the days when they still poured tea on the plastic tablecloths to clean them up. For exercise I cycled round Central Park most days at a time when it was unkempt and somewhat dangerous. I usually
stopped to spend hour in the Metropolitan Museum which was then far from crowded and a great deal more
dusty and quaint than it is today. But then this was also a long time ago. These days I live outside the city and
travel in several times a week to teach at the School of Visual Arts. Much of my city experience is of art studios
and cheap eateries in Chelsea, of trips to galleries and exhibitions. I am much accustomed to pushing through
crowds at Grand Central Station, shopping for art supplies and rummaging through bookstores. I have also experienced my share of drama over the years including corpses on the street, riots, blackouts, looting, muggings and
madness. And like many New Yorkers I waiver between loving the place and loathing it. When I’m away for too
long I have the uncomfortable feeling that I might be missing something. When I am there I can find it oppressive
and overwhelming.
So then how to paint it? I had no wish to engage in the kind of intense topographical description that I used in my
early paintings of London. I felt I wanted to try to paint the inhabitants using the city. – to capture both people
and place. And to paint people in New York you have to paint a lot of them; it is a place above all of crowds,
mobs and throngs. Whether you are food shopping or lining up for a restaurant or teaching a class, you are
generally doing it in company of quite a few others. I began to look closely at people on the street, at how they
throng and move but the drama I was seeking to convey was often hard to spy in single scenes. I sketched and
photographed and took videos wondering how to show the ways in which New Yorkers interact with their city.
I soon realized that I would have to edit and restructure and I would have to be fanciful at times. Ordinary as
many of the scenes were, they would have to be rebuilt if they were to give up their magic. And then there were
things that I wanted to paint about that didn’t necessarily have a direct visual counterpart. For instance I meet a
Stock Exchange (Study) 2014 Pen and ink and watercolor on paper. 17” x 30”
great many people who work in the financial industry but the intensity and competitiveness of that world is hard
to discern in the sight of suited figures sitting at desks. Or watching men and boys sail boats on the Central Park
boating pond is engaging and intriguing, but visually often rather restrained. Might I not be able to find away to
convey the imaginative intensity of the participants by veering away somewhat from the world of appearances?
So I determined to give myself some leeway. I would allow gesture to be exaggerated, settings to be rebuilt, and
elements to appear from my imagination if I felt the need. I tried to keep away from any sort of laborious realist
rendering as far as I could, adopting instead a direct painterly shorthand in which I reserved the right to get more
detailed when I felt it was warranted. In many ways all this was new territory for me, and I hope I will be forgiven
if the results are somewhat uneven.
Inevitably, taking on crowds has led me to a new appreciation of artists who have embraced the subject. Breughel the Elder, Hogarth and Rowlandson are just a few of the people whose work has come alive to me in a
new way. Breughel is particularly interesting for the way in which he animates each of his figures in a crowded
composition, giving them clearly readable movements and gestures. He also succeeded in conveying a sense of
his whole world, giving us a glimpse of a society interacting in complex and various ways and doing it with charm
and insight. Looking at his work we recognize life going on as it does and must. The artist has understanding and
affection for everybody in his works, for the dancers at the wedding and those who stand by chatting and scheming. For the dog under the table. I would never claim to put myself on the same footing as such a very great artist but I have learned an awful lot from him and I like to think that something of his outlook has found its way into
my version of New York.
And beyond all these things there is the life of the painting itself. It has always seemed to me that part of the
Crowd Study 2014 Oil on Linen 20” x 30”
pleasure of looking at many paintings is in sharing the artist’s joy of discovery. We may appreciate the skilled
crafting of some works, and admire sublime rendering skills or expressionist pyrotechnics. But what we respond
to most powerfully is revelation, the sense that the artist is discovering something new about the world, and that
it’s happening in front of us. As an artist it is only when I take on something of which I am not certain, something
that is perhaps not yet revealed to me, that I can have any hope of conveying this sense. How could I possibly
capture the throngs and mayhem, the diversity of action within the grand setting of Union Square? I had no idea
until I tried and the resulting painting still looks far from satisfactory to me. But I’m aware that it is probably its
very awkwardness that will attract the viewer, the lack of surety. So that I have become convinced that you paint
something best when you don’t know how to paint it. And the heartening thing about this is that as long as the
world seems exciting and interesting it will be possible to make exciting and interesting paintings about it.
John A. Parks
February 2015
Girls 14th Street. (Homage to Isabel Bishop) 2013 Oil on Linen 32” x 40”
Grand Central, 2013 Oil on Linen 30” x 40”
Boating Pond, 2013 Oil on Linen 30” x 40”
Shake Shack Line, Madison Square, 2014 Oil on Linen 30” x 40”
Metropolitan Museum, 2014 Oil on Linen 30” x 40”
Dog Walking, 2014 Oil on Linen 30” x 40”
Trader Joe’s, 2014 Oil on Linen 30” x 42”
Union Square, 2013 Oil on Linen 30” x 40”
Continuing Ed, 2014 Oil on Linen 30” x 42”
Stock Exchange, 2015 Oil on Linen 30” x 42”
John A. Parks
Born Leeds, England 1952
Education
1973-76 Royal College of Art, London. MA(RCA) in Painting.
1970-73 Hull College of Art. BFA.
Solo Exhibitions
In New York, 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York, 2015
Paint and Memory. 532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel, New York, 2012.
Southern Vermont Arts Center. Retrospective, 2008.
Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 2005.
Cricket Hill Gallery, New York, 2002.
Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, 1992.
Louis Newman Gallery, Beverly Hills CA, 1991.
Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, 1991.
Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 1987.
Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 1984.
Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 1982.
Allan Stone Gallery, New York, 1978.
Selected Group Exhibitions
Context Art, Miami, December 2013
Made in the UK: Contemporary Art from the Richard Brown Baker Collection
Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design, 2011.
Miami Art Basel, Art Fair, 2006.
Armory Art Fair, New York, 2006.
London, Paris, New York. Beadleston Gallery, New York. 1998.
Royal Academy, London, 1974 and 1975.
Selected Collections
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Awards
National Endowment for the Arts Grant, 1988.
British Institute Award for Figurative Painting, 1974.
Fulbright Travel Grant, 1974.
Pears Portrait Commission, 1976.
Selected Articles and Reviews
New York Times, December 13, 2012. Review by Roberta Smith
Workshop Magazine, Winter 2006. Full length feature.
Pulse Magazine, June 2005. In-depth interview.
New York Sun, June 2005. Review by John Goodrich.
American Artist Magazine, April 1992. Feature profile.
ArtSpeak, 1984. Feature article.
New York Times. May 1982. Review by John Russell.
Selected Publications by the Artist
Universal Principles of Art, Rockport Publishers, 2014. 228 pages.
The Paintings of George Bellows. American Artist Magazine, September, 2012.
Drawings from the Courtauld Collection. Drawing Magazine, Fall 2012.
Paint and Longing. The Paintings of John Alexander Parks. Introduction by Tim Parks.
Published by Blurb Press and iBooks.
John Ruskin and his Influence on American Art. American Artist Magazine,
June 2007.
Samuel Palmer. Watercolor Magazine, Spring 2006.
Winslow Homer. American Artist Magazine, May 2006.
Rubens’ Drawings. Drawing Magazine, Spring 2005.
The Drawings of Lucien Freud, Drawing Magazine, Fall 2004.
Teaching
Member of the faculty of the School of Visual Arts, New York since 1979. Various visiting assignments and workshops.
Website
www.johnaparks.com
532 Gallery Thomas Jaeckel New York
Hours: Tue - Sat 11- 6pm
[email protected]
Street Crossing, 2013 Oil on Linen 19” x 30”
532 WEST 25TH STREET
NEW YORK NY 10001
Tel: 917 701 3338