Michael Parkes' Style & Technique

by John Russell Taylor

"Of course, Parkes has always been exceptional among his generation in his unflagging pursuit of beauty. The goddess/angel/women in his paintings are always what in any other hands one would call impossibly beautiful. "In your dreams, fella!" one might be tempted to cry. But if the dreamer happens to be called Michael Parkes, then everything is fine, for he has the total conviction in his own dreams, backed up by the requisite crystalline sureness of technique, which enforces belief in the observer. Some call it Magic Realism, and both parts of the equation apply, in that the realism of the treatment is undoubtedly dusted with magic.

The dreamy boy, enclosed in his own imaginings of fantastic animals, remote yet erotically potent beauties, moons and stars and strange celestial manifestations, and the occasional slightly sinister grotesque, has grown into the man unashamedly ready to follow his own visionary gleam.

The "things" in Parkes's later paintings and lithographs go one better. They are not "almost" anything, but very fully and precisely occupy their own space, even before Parkes has gone one step further, by taking up sculpture. The two-dimensional images are already extremely specific. They could almost be described as photo-realistic, except that they are of something no one could hope to photograph, in this or any other world.

So who or what are the inhabitants of this strange new world Parkes leads us graciously into? A beautiful woman is a beautiful woman, whatever the circumstances, and there are certainly enough of them in Parkes's own personal vision. But how many of them are just beautiful women? Even if they do not have wings or horns, they seem to come from some Valhalla (many are clearly warrior women, kin to the Amazons), or maybe from the slopes of Mount Olympus, where gods and demi-gods engage in the gender arts of music and dance. Or again, from some obscure corner of the Hindu pantheon, where supernatural beings may sprout supernumerary limbs without losing an iota of charm or grace.

But these elegant creatures do not live alone in this mysterious space, somewhere between heaven and earth. There are also strange male beings, often dressed like a refugee from the commedia dell'arte, or as a jester or a court dwarf. These make a sort of bridge between the radiant and the shadowy-sinister. And when we come to the animals, almost anything goes. If the lion does not exactly lie down with the lamb, the hypogryph seems to be on friendly terms with the domestic cat, the monkey with the swan, the hound with the sphinx. Not to mention intermediary forms, in which an owl has human features, or a bull grows feathers to fly with. Why should they not regard the air as their medium quite as much as earth, in the world of gravitas without gravity?

Though he studied graphic art and painting at the University of Kansas, his unique style evolved very much in isolation, after a period in which he gave up the practice of art altogether and went off to India in search of philosophical illumination: born in 1944, he was very much of the hippie generation.

Earlier on, he had painted in the generally Abstract Expressionist style normal among his teachers, but after his pause for reflection he began to draw and paint in a meticulous style of detailed representation which would enable him to give full expression to his inner world of images.

The style was in principle realistic, the subject matter magical, and Magic Realism has characterised his work ever since.

He has studied deeply in esoteric doctrine of the East and the West, and his imagery is drawn from a range of wisdoms including the Cabalistic and the Tantric, but embodied in forms from his own imagination which are immediately accessible. Here strange beasts encounter mysterious winged women, good and evil fight out their immemorial conflict (though who can be perfectly sure which is which?), and in this weightless environment worlds are unmade and remade nearer to the heart's desire.

Even as a student Parkes was fascinated by various graphic processes, and in recent years he has become highly proficient in the difficult medium of the colour stone lithograph."

John Russell Taylor, art critic for The London Times
(Author of the book: Michael Parkes Stone Lithographs - Bronze Sculptures)