Education
Parker took a large body of very detailed work to Toronto where he met with Nancy Poole of the Nancy Poole Art Gallery. This body of work included the painting “Jocelyn.” Poole was impressed with the quality of the work and recommended that Parker apply to the Academy in Madrid or to Mount Allison University in New Brunswick. Parker chose Mount Allison in part due to the reputation Alex Colville had brought to the Fine Art Department there and in part because he wanted an opportunity to explore a new region of Canada.
David Silverberg was one of Parker ’s professors at Mount Allison University. Silverberg was an energetic and charismatic instructor with an international reputation in the graphic arts. He introduced Parker to various print making techniques including engraving. This influence can be seen in the piece “When You Live It You Go Insane ”(p.4). Silverberg also inspired the young artist to produce the highest quality work possible. Under Silverberg ’s inspiration, Parker worked day and night for two years. At the end of that period he was ready to move on to a new institution and a new region of the country.
Silverberg encouraged Parker to apply to the Banff Centre ’s winter program. In his letter of support, he wrote, “ I have rarely had a young man so dedicated, so serious, so accomplished and so much in charge of his efforts as Randolph. The results of his labours have proved to be very personal works of art — works that are moving as well as technically proficient. He is in short a terrific student.” This letter, combined with a strong portfolio, opened the door to Banff for Parker.
On his way to Banff in the autumn of 1978 Parker crossed the Canadian prairies for the first time The vast space and the colour had a profound effect on his way of seeing. Parker had been living and painting in Ontario, Canadian Shield country and the Maritimes where rocks, forests and lakes are close at hand. Suddenly, as he passed through the prairies on his way to Banff, the landscape offered open skies where Parker could observe subtleties of changing light on a vast scale. Even the wedges and ribbons of colour that made up the distant fields seemed more purely optical and less about texture.
These observations influenced Parker and made their way into his work as his painting took on more subtleties and less tactility. This was reinforced by the impact of Takao Tanabe, director of the Banff program at the time, who had a colour field approach to painting the prairies and foothills that dealt with the drama of light and space. Colour field painting uses broad areas of flat colour stained or thinly painted onto the canvas to express a relationship between colour and form. It is a style that reinforces the integrity of the two-dimensional surface of the painting, an idea developed from American abstract expressionism of the 1950s.
Tanabe brought to Banff a number of artists and critics from across Canada and the United States to talk about their art and critique the students ’work. It was a unique opportunity for the 10 art students in the Winter Programme to have the individual attention of such national figures such as Gordon Rayner, Claude Breeze, Vera Frenkel, Terry Fenton and the Californian Joseph Raphael.
Raphael ’s paintings had a strong influence on Parker.
When viewed from a distance Raphael ’s large-scale paintings were photographic looking, yet the areas of the painting that made up the image were spontaneously painted with drips, splatters and stains. An example might be the eye of a frog that, seen from eight feet away might look perfectly real, but at close range looked like a cosmic world of drips, stains and smears of paint. It was the realism and the love of the natural that attracted Parker to Raphael ’s work, it was the paint handling that excited him and it was the way Raphael ’s paintings mingled realism with abstraction that would lead Parker on and have him re-examine his thoughts on what a painting could be.
Parker ’s breakthrough came when he realized that he did not have to rely on a predetermined image but could break out of that confinement and allow the paint and the painting process to be the work of art. This also allowed his emotions to guide the painting process, and, as a result, his paintings became more creative and less illustrative. It was during this year that his work changed from outdoor landscape painting in the style of the Group of Seven, to a fluid abstraction.
These early paintings were treated like windows looking into a cosmic world of painterly activity. During this transition, Parker ’s artistic philosophy changed to: The closer you get to the object that you are painting the less you see it and the more you see the cosmic structure that makes it up.
