J.S. Parker

Works

Overview

Whatever is wretched

Whatever is wretched

Whatever is wonderful

What flecks like stone

What bleeds like rust

Whatever is funny and foolish

in its awkwardness

Whatever resounds in those deep recesses

that receives all that is grave and serious

What flits like sun

is battered and bruised like industrial waste

What weighs like the curtain of sadness

What kicks like the coursing of the blood

What loves, laughs, sings

Whatever remains after all the changes

have been made

Whatever fixes and holds, however elusive,

The station of the soul and

The song of its return home.

J.S. Parker, 1980

J.S. Parker poems: 1963 - 2017

This selection of significant oils by late artist J.S. Parker (with some recently released from the family collection) are examples of the Marlborough artist’s classic impasto style - thick paint applied by palette knife on canvas to create layers of light and rich colour.

All works in this show demonstrate his mastery of using paint to create, change and generally play with the concept of space. All these works are also Parker’s painterly responses to landscape and music. Plain Song: Canterbury Sky - a memory of a car trip in Christchurch with an intense orange sunset. A rare ‘Sermon’ painting from the 1980s - repeated white squares organised in a grid - but none of them perfect or rigid in their form. The Blue Cross, one of few remaining of several done at the time he was working on a potential commission for the Christchurch Catholic Cathedral for the ‘Stations of the Cross’. A classic Parker Plain Song – Rarangi –featuring the colours of ploughed fields and the grey skies and sands of his favourite walking place.

All with a connecting thread – a curiosity on how to manipulate space and form on a canvas. Fixing and holding – however elusive.

Mary Parker