The Long View: Artist Randolph Parker’s unwavering vision
Profile by Shelagh Plunkett (page 2)
Just out of high school, Parker took a summer job at a plastics factory in his hometown of Huntsville, Ontario. He worked so efficiently on the floor that the manager quickly promoted him to the office, where he did the payroll. The next summer the bosses called Parker into the meeting and made him an offer. They would pay for his tuition and expenses towards a degree in business, and during the summers they would place him in their various factories around the country so that he could get to know the company. In exchange for this generosity, they expected Parker to work for them (with pay) for as many years after graduation as it took him to complete his degree. Parker turned the offer down. It would have meant a ten year sidetrack from his true path.
“I accepted poverty. I knew that was inevitable,” says Parker.
Fear of failure is part of what kept him focused for more than 30 years. “If you pursue a path for 30 years and you’re still not good at it, well, then you’re sort of out on a limb.”
Parker’s response to this was to drive himself harder and harder, especially in the early years when he says that he painted night and day. During those years he studied at Mount Allison University, Banff School of Fine Art and York University while his artistic path took him through styles ranging from complex engravings to thick impasto abstracts, from realist water colours to Capital Farmlands, a massive 4 x 16 foot landscape painted in 1991.
