With this new approach to painting Parker headed off to York University in the autumn of 1981 to study advanced painting with Paul Sloggett and art criticism with Ken Carpenter. Although he had studied European and North American art history. Parker had not been exposed to a critical understanding of art. Carpenter introduced him to the ideas of numerous critics and philosophers, especially Clement Greenberg, Herschel B.Chipp and Immanuel Kant.
Through the writings of Clement Greenberg, art critic and one of the most important observers of contemporary trends in painting, Parker became aware that there were theories of modern art and that although a painter might accept or reject those theories, one could not deny their influence. One of those theories states that from the Renaissance to Courbet an artist ’s first task has been to create the illusion of space on a flat surface. Modern painting, through generations of artists, has rendered that illusion of space shallower and shallower until the painting has become flat. The painting no longer depicts a space in which we live but has come to occupy the space in which we live. The painting itself has become a work of art.
Parker began to follow the idea of enhancing the two dimensional aspects of a painting ’s surface in order to make it more of an object. Abstraction dominated his painting throughout this period and his work took on a decidedly flat characteristic. The surfaces were highly textured, carved into and over-sprayed with paint to enhance their texture and give them an illusion of light and shadow. Strangely enough, rather than denying the illusion to space, Parker’s paintings during this period began to actually create a far greater space. The paintings resembled satellite photographs of Earth.
Eventually this enhancement of the painted surface would lead to objects being added to surface of the work as seen in the constructionist piece “Kandinsky Plus ” (p.6). At the same time Parker produced some brilliant paintings reminiscent of works by Miro, Kandinsky, Gorky, Rothko and Picasso.
But, as good as the paintings were technically and intellectually, Parker felt that they lacked an identity of their own and that they utilized theories that were already well worked out. He made a list of outstanding Canadian artists that he admired. These artists did not fit into any one particular style but covered a broad spectrum of approaches to painting from the abstractions of Jean-Paul Riopelle, Jack Shadbolt, Harold Town and Jack Bush to the works of Tom Tompson, E.J.Hughs, William Kurelek, Ivan Eyre and Patterson Ewen, and on to the realism of Alex Coleville and Christopher Pratt. What they shared for Parker was not a single idea of what modern art was about, but rather their unique and individual styles, which reflected in their paintings who they each were. Through this exercise, Parker realized that his own artistic personality had diminished during his study of modern art.
The idea of an art for art ’s sake held little interest for him. Parker now needed a source, from life, to inspire him and to awaken his own artistic identity. That source was the land.
