It is with characteristic self-deprecating wit that Virginia Parker calls herself a hybrid painter-writer.Her keenly observant eye serves both the writer and the painter, and reflects the same wit and charm that she projects as a person, on canvas and on paper.
A chronicler of life, Parker focuses on the things she loves best, and then paints them in meticulous detail, until the tomatoes are oozing with such luscious juice and the mussels are dripping with such unctuous butter that we have to hold back from grabbing the French fries and soaking them in the sauce.And of course within each perfectly rendered painting is a story or a witty exchange that reminds us of the clever artist who captured this moment in time and rendered it eternal.
Parker describes her career path as follows:“An Atlanta native, I lived in northern California in the sixties, and worked in front of the camera in Europe in the seventies. Since the eighties I've worked as a writer. I'm fascinated by the skin of the world, the bounce and skitter of light on textures, and the push and pull of shadows on form. When not herding nouns and verbs on the page, I am working on a series of paintings and currently live 1.4 miles from the house I grew up in.” We are so delighted to represent this highly talented and thoroughly enjoyable artist whose meticulous hyper-realist style is, for us, a welcome and different angle on art.We’re also proud that Parker’s artwork was recently featured in a bevy of Atlanta magazines and publications, including Atlanta Magazine, Piedmont Review and Northside Neighbor newspaper (click here to read the article). We're also very excited about a profile on Virginia Parker that appeared in the January 2010 issue of American Art Collector. Click on the link below.
In this new series of work, the artist has used her own clever words to explain the power of the brush, as follows: "Publishing's Bleak House: Books hold the key to knowledge, and the end of the printed book is fast approaching.Publishing’s business model in the age of corporation is a House of Cards, beginning to topple. At the center is the Fool card, heedless on the edge of the precipice, above him is the Wheel of Fortune, reversed, and the Page of Pentacles, the bringer of news, is sliding out of sight.The Kindle is positioned to inherit the readers who are left. And with the demise of publishing houses comes the shuttering of bookstores.
“At its nineties peak, the indie-only American Booksellers Association had 4,700 member stores; today it has 1,700.” Boris Kachka, New York magazine(9/14/09) “E-books could spell the end for hardbacks, warns Arnaud Nourry, CEO of French publishers Hachette.”(8/30/09) Financial Times, London(8/30/09)
Blood and Knavery I
Blood and Knavery II
Periodical Blues
Didus Ineptus, sold
Palais Leichtenstein Library
Prediction: Endangered, sold
We'd like to take a moment to brag about this artist: Not only were we delighted to learn from Virginia recently that two of her paintings ("Vermeer Rycled" and "San Marco Savonarola Chair") were accepted into the prestigious Quinlan Visual Arts Center, in Gainesville, Georgia but we also learned that she has been accepted to the (equally prestigious) Hambidge Residency Center, also in Georgia. In its typically enthusiastic and spirited manner, the note Virginia sent us regarding the latter read as follows: "An email confirmed my acceptance to the Hambidge Residency Program (insert celebratory cartwheel and handstand here). That means three weeks (from 9/29/09 through 10/18/09) of room and board, zero distractions, and a studio of my own. Your happy happy artist, VA." Congratulations to our happy, happy artist - and we can't wait to see what will spring forth from this special time.
The Gilded Interval
Image:
Each one of the paintings above comes with a story, and we love hearing from the artist what lies behind the "double ententes" and clever little anecdotes that we try to decipher between the lines. One of our favorites is the laundry line that Virginia came across in a Venice canal. Trying to figure out who the all-black laundry belonged to, she initially thought, "It must be a New Yorker." And then, upon further examination, she thought it was someone in mourning. And finally, when she realized it was a priest's laundry, she laughed at the hidden meaning behind a priest's airing his clean laundry out to dry.
Image:
The complete titles of the wonderful little jewels above are actually:
Time is not money. If you day is spent drawing it turns to pure gold.
Write home for money while the lion of St. Mark watches the canal.
Image:
Image:
To appreciate Parker’s intricate and time-consuming process of painting, we’ve chronicled the development of a painting, below, in four stages.In every stage, it’s fun to see how she focuses on one small part of the painting and works it to complex levels of detail.
People often ask us, “How long did it take the artist to paint that?” and of course the answer varies greatly by artist.But we can tell you that with Virginia Parker, it can be a matter of months of what the artist calls “excruciatingly slow and tedious (detail) until I fall into it and then time elapses, my mind is quiet and absorption total - then it's pure pleasure.”
Image:
Looking at the evolution of “San Marco,” we couldn't wait to see the finished painting.See the progression of detail in the chair from one “sitting” to the next.In the artist’s words, “Working on the big San Marco piece, the detailed commissioned view of Venice and the sweeping sky scape of Isle of Palm II makes me feel wonderfully stretched and supple. It's like running, swimming, and yoga each use muscles in a different way.”
