JONATHAN PARKER | Notes

“I work by intuition or feeling, using a sensibility I’ve developed over time to guide me, rather than my critical mind. In this way I’ve eliminated some of the internal thinking, which for me can get in the way. I do my work, one piece at a time, trying to have no expectations – just an open heart for what is to come. Primarily, the paintings are first and foremost about shapes, and how shapes work alongside each other or stand on their own.  My recent larger work – which either hang together as a grid or are sewn onto a large piece of canvas – sit in my imagination as works that slowly unfold or reveal.

Individually, many of my small pieces are minimal in form, however, when I put them together in a grid format, they become more complex; connecting with each other in interesting ways. I find my eyes dancing over the pieces, settling on a section and then moving on to another, and another — each time I look I find kinships I didn’t see before; an abstract narrative, conveying emotions, with many paths for the viewer to jump into through the shapes, colors or the texture of the work.

My own intention is at the center of each piece I make, but ultimately each painting speaks its own language. When I make art, I have something to say, however, when I stand before a finished work, it has something to say to me. And if the painting works, it speaks not in my voice but in a universal language.”

- ­Jonathan Parker

Leaning into the history and tactile familiarity of his chosen material, Jonathan Parker’s constructed painted and sewn paintings on unprimed canvas and other vintage fabrics, possess an inviting haptical allure. The cut and sewn elements of Parker’s practice well-serves his intuitive hand with each rectangular composition bearing the cloth’s unique worn past or the saturation of the artist’s pigment applications. Discernable in every needle-and-thread stitched line or formal compositional alliance, the artist reveals an interactive, abstract language made manifest with the newly assembled multi-part paintings where thirty stylistically divergent canvases converge in large-scale, colorful fusions which invite closer inspection. For Parker, each element is a meditation, for the viewer, a mesmerizing display of pure invention.

Jonathan Parker’s work is in the permanent collection of the Oakland Museum of California, CA, and in multiple private and corporate collections including the David & Lucile Packard Foundation and the Kaiser Foundation. Parker has been recognized with numerous honors including a Painting Residency and Painting Fellowship at Djerassi Residency Artists Program in Woodside, CA, an Artist Residency at the Kala Institute (Printmaking), Berkeley, CA; Painting Residency, Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL; Painting Residency, Blue Mountain Center, Blue Mountain Lake, NY; Affiliate Artist Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; a painting residency/fellowship at Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY and a San Francisco Bay Regional Painting Fellowship, Fleishhacker Foundation, San Francisco, CA. His work has also been featured in the Pacific Coast edition of New American Paintings. Parker’s work has been exhibited nationally throughout California, Washington, New Mexico, New Jersey, Colorado, Texas, Maryland, and New York along, with a solo exhibition in Berlin, Germany. Parker was recently featured in an extensive group exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM, and the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA.