"Landscapes put viewer at the top"
As a landscape artist, Randolph Parker’s view outside his studio is paramount in importance. Indeed, the vista of Active Pass not only inspired but became fodder for a lesson reluctantly accepted by this writer.As a former art instructor and a present karate black belt who leads classes for the Salt Spring Island Karate Club, Parker is a gifted teacher. Pointing out natural phenomenon in the view and how that translates to a canvas is fascinating as an intellectual exercise. Actually painting is another thing.
He wanted me to take hold of the house paint brush he uses to start his very large paintings, the smallest is three by five feet and the largest is twenty five feet long, and have a go at his canvas. Now this was a painting destined for one of the five galleries he supplies across Canada - Bau-Xi in Vancouver and Toronto, the Masters Gallery in Calgary, Mayberry Gallery in Winnipeg and the Winchester Gallery in Victoria. The paintings cost around $5,000 to $10,000 each. I managed a 70 per cent mark in high school art, but only because I aced the art history module. Thankfully, the lush landscapes are painted over five to seven times, so hopefully my cranky daubings will be hidden underneath Parker’s gorgeous renderings.
The work is not exact duplication but rather a combination of elements he finds in the photographs taken on his many travels and sights seen from his deck.“Its easy to illustrate,” suggested Parker, “but harder to create. It’s the treatment of light and shadow that I get to play with “.He starts with a wash of colour, beginning with the sky. Done quite quickly, 45 minutes on the canvas I observed, he can then go back to create a visual journey.
As he points out areas on the canvas where he manipulates a viewer’s eye to follow, a physical connection based in Parker’s own love of nature and outdoor activities is revealed. Two layers of mountains meander into foothills that evolve into a flower-strewn foreground.
“ I have an infinite fascination with the complexity of interconnected rhythms that I get through journeying through the land,” he explained.
The use of the layering with the larger brush gives it an impressionist feel, while supreme detail looks hyper-real, making for a visceral experience for the viewer.
“ When I travel to the tops of mountains, I want the viewer to feel what that’s like.”
You could be looking at the painting of the mountain and experience being on that mountain at the same time. That notion is actually quite post-modern, coming from a landscape artist, but Parker has found his niche after a long history of exploration.
In his book, Beyond the Brush, Parker chronicles his growth as an artist from his childhood in Huntsville, Ontario, sitting on the border of Algonguin Park, Group of Seven country, to his life as an artist on Salt Spring Island.
Parker painted from an early age, encouraged by his parents, even winning a prize at the age of six. A brief foray into nudes in grade 5, selling for 10 cents a piece, halted his entrepreneurial sprit: the principal found out and put an end to it. After high school, he was determined to be a painter and so, at the hunting camp of trapper Wes Wood on 100 acres of land bordering Algonquin Park, Parker spent three months painting in isolation.
Though Nancy Poole of the Nancy Poole Art Gallery in Toronto was impressed with the quality of the work, she recommended he apply to university. Mount Allison University in New Brunswick preceded his experience at the Banff Centre’s winter program directed by Takao Tanabe, who had a colour field approach to painting. Travelling through the prairies into the majesty of the mountains initiated his love of the different rhythms and flow of the varied landscape, a passion so evident today.
Armed with inspiration from a guest visiting artist, Parker headed off to York University in the autumn of 1981 to study advanced painting with Paul Sloggett and art criticism with Ken Carpenter. In 1992, Parker moved to Ottawa in the Gatineau Hills and the Ottawa Valley, inspiring him to take a fresh look at landscape painting and teach watercolours at the Ottawa School of Art. His work has moved from high realism to surrealism to abstraction, but he has found his niche across Canada with his landscapes.
“ There is a strange spiritual union between the world that I paint and that one that I live in, “ philosophizes Parker. “ It is not unusual for someone who knows my work to come up to me and say that they saw a Parker the other day while driving or hiking somewhere.”
His paintings are born of imagination, but blur the line between what reality is and what it should be, securing his reputation as one of Canada’s premier landscape artists.
