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Artist’s Statement

  

Refuge, Heidi Cho Gallery

Anne Michie, November 2005

  In a world of increasing terror, Katherine Parker’s new paintings beckon us with a mirage of physical refuge. While Parker’s painterly touch evokes the seductive beauty of landscape, her landscapes also present the shadow of menace – a toxic cloud, a melting sun, an angry storm of brush strokes.  Yet there remains optimism – in the lush colors and the sensitively textured surfaces – serving as a beacon of beauty and engagement.

Parker’s facility with the history of painting grounds her exploration of the line between abstraction and landscape, revealing inspiration from such pivotal artists as de Kooning, Rothko, Porter, and Matisse.  Rather than a post-modern pastiche of these artists, Parker offers homage in the best sense: one painter’s contribution to the on-going dialogue between artists.  Parker articulates in this series that if the act of painting offers refuge, it must also exist in the lived world, with all the complications and concerns of the present.

 

 

Self-Evidence, Gallery 31 North

Kristen Accola, July 2004

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  As with much art that is inspired by that which is deeply felt and mysterious, abstract forms become the necessary evidence of self, as if there can be no other, further or better proof. In Self Evidence, painter Katherine Parker works intuitively and spontaneously, giving her medium an expressive life of its own with which to convey deeper meaning.

Carving, dripping and scraping the paint, Katherine Parker makes marks that quietly ignite the surfaces of her canvases. Large spaces of calm and sometimes turmoil open up the surface for these bold or whispering signs and symbols. Sometimes confrontational, sometimes just commenting they beckon us in, push us out or let us contemplate. In all the paintings there is an embrace of understated urgency. The possibilities in the language of paint are always surprising. In Parker’s hands it is a compelling, ongoing dialogue as well.

 

 

States of Union, Queens College Art Center

Ann Holcomb, 16 March, 2003

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Katherine Parker gives nuanced expression to internal consciousness in her brilliantly lush oil paintings. Early modernists sought a higher plane through purely visual and material means. Parker’s goals and methods are similar, but her sights more realistic. As she methodically overlays paint strata and graphic marks, the planes she achieves are shifting, neither high nor low, and filled with evanescent archetypal symbols and forms along with flotsam and jetsam from mundane affairs.

Although there is no firm commitment to anything but the paint and an aggregate approach, Parker does provide clues for reading her densely textured color fields. The terse titles (Trigger, Solace, Retreat), imagery and palette of her Reparation Series, 2000–2003, suggest reactions to the events of September 11, 2001. As in all of Parker’s work, there are other possible readings as well concerning confusion, epiphany, affinity and isolation—a kind of visual pilgrim’s progress. Parker’s subtly worked and intensely compressed color fields and quirkily serviceable vocabulary both seduce and confound, but the experience of teasing out strands and meanings provides a pleasurable act of communion between viewer and maker.