Biography
Born: 1927, Norfolk, Virginia,
Robert Andrew Parker attended the school of the Art Institute
of Chicago from 1948
until 1952 and worked during the following months
at the
Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and
at Stanley William Hayter's Atelier 17 in New York. Since his
first solo
show in 1954, Parker has exhibited extensively, and his
credits
include set designs for opera and film as well as book
illustrations.
In his watercolors Parker
combines areas of pure color with design conceived in terms
of silhouette and shape. He takes
his subject
matter mostly from the natural world—dogs, trees, mountains,
people, birds—and condenses and simplifies imagery
with a swift, expressionistic technique. During his career
Parker
has worked in such distinctive locales as Arles and Saint-Remy
in France and the Himalayas, where a 1981 walking tour provided
the subjects for a series on landscapes and fellow trekkers.
SOURCE: Virginia M. Mecklenburg.
Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection
(Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian
Institution
Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987).
