Charcoal allows me to see my ideas come to life as soon as I conceive them…
“I think the reason I’ve always been drawn to these mediums is because the immediacy of charcoal allows me to see my ideas come to life as soon as I conceive them,” Parker said. “Sometimes I do preliminary sketches before I start creating, but for
Mostly I like to start painting as soon as the concept is fresh in my mind. Charcoal allows me to produce a wide range of value within the pace of my preferred work. As a fairly simple and straightforward medium, it challenges me to push the possible capabilities it can offer visually. “
When starting to create a scene, the artist “keeps it very loose and posed at the beginning so as not to lose the sense of movement of the entire piece.” Unlike its 17th-century predecessors, the Internet now provides artists with endless source material from which to draw details. She found herself on a journey down the internet rabbit hole unearthing “cheesy” and “awful” stock images and memes. It is these touches that make her work completely contemporary and universal at the same time. “I find it interesting that searching the internet for these kind words will bring you an endless amount of unexpected and sometimes disturbing content,” she said. “I pick out aspects of different photos that I like and put my imagination into them.”
These specific works evolved over the several years of the artist’s college career. These studies began with a period at Pratt Institute in New York in 2015, before the artist transferred to his current school and this summer to Leipzig for a residency. (She then had one year left at the New York Academy of Art.) During that time, the awards piled up: the Utah Sterling Scholar Award in the Visual Arts, the Foundation Merit Award, the Painting Scholar Award. KAWS’ recent shoutout on social media is the latest in recognition from his peers. Her work has appeared in group exhibitions including FIX Collaborative’s “Women in Spaces: Past / Present” and Flag Art Foundation’s “Drawn Together Again.” All of this goes to show that Parker’s crowded paintings carry weight with any crowd that visits her work.
However, the artist explores more than just our most extrovert lives in the party scene. They are also isolated explorations, looking at how we change in the many contexts of life. “People tend to transform into different versions of themselves in any situation we find ourselves in,” she writes. “Whether it’s blending into our surroundings or the environment subconsciously influencing us, it’s our own way of adapting. I spent most of my childhood moving around, and I was constantly adapting to new surroundings. What I didn’t realize at the time was that not only was the place I lived changing, but my own outlook on life and life was changing as well.”*
This article first appeared in Issue 52 of High Fructose, which is now sold out. Subscribe to High Fructose here to get our latest issue and support our independent arts coverage.
