Graham Parks' small-scale paintings depict silhouette-like fragments of natural and urban landscapes. Treetops and Modernist facades are transformed into reductive, poetic simplifications. Executed in a streamlined, graphically precise style, Parks' essentialist paintings record places with which the artist has a personal connection, and explore the alliance between nature and architecture.
Parks first takes photographs of places he wishes to remember, such as a mountain lake outside where he was raised or buildings in a city that he has visited. He then crops and edits a picture to its most fundamental elements while creating a flat, frontal opticality to his highly formal paintings. In what is a labor-intensive and meditative process, Parks meticulously tapes off polarized sections from one another, crisply separating textured and matte from smooth and glossy surfaces in alternately vibrant colors or muted and monochromatic palettes.
Having the clarity of haiku-like abstractions, these spare paintings read quickly yet linger in the mind's eye like a welcome afterimage.
Graham Parks at Kinz, Tillou + Feigen, Jan. 12 - Mar. 10, 2007
Graham Parks at Feigen Contemporary, Jan. 6 - Feb. 19, 2005