Robert Andrew Parker

My Avro 555 (Bison I), 2002

Monotype

Image size: 22 1/2" x 30"

Paper size: 22 1/2" x 30"

Estimated value: $1800

Printed at CCP

Robert Andrew Parker was born in Norfolk, VA in 1927. He is known for both his paintings and prints of figures, landscapes, and animals. His luminescent watercolor paintings and drawings are characterized by a loose, playful integration of subject and background, a metaphysical emphasis on the environment, natural or otherwise. Parker has produced set designs for operas and films, as well as illustrations for over 40 children's books during the course of his career. "Robert Andrew Parker is one of the most accurate and at the same time most unliteral of painters," the poet Marianne Moore wrote of him. "He combines the mystical and the actual, working both in an abstract and a realistic way." In 1956, he was recruited to play the role of Vincent van Gogh's hands in the MGM film Lust for Life, though his hands never ended up in the finished film, he was able to live lavishly in the South of France during the production. In 1970, the artist began one of his best-known series of works. Based on the World War II-era poems of Keith Douglas, the suite of watercolors portray both the wistful days of a British solider on holiday and the bleak reality of his time fighting in the battlefields of Egypt.

He studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago from 1948-50, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine in 1952 and with Stanley William Hayter at Atelier17 in New York from 1952 to 1953. Parker has taught at Rhode Island School of Design; Parsons School of Design, NYC; Syracuse University, NY; the School of Visual Arts, NYC, as well as the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Among his many awards and accolades he has received a Ranger Fund Purchase Prize from the National Academy of Design, New York in 1987, a Connecticut Commission on the Arts grant in 1979, was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1969-70, a Fellowship to the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, in Los Angeles, 1967 and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Grant from Institute of Arts and Letters, New York in 1962. As an illustrator, he has been recognized with a Caldecott Honor and an American Library Association Notable Book award.

Parker has shown extensively in both national and international exhibition and his work in in the collections of countless private and public collections including: Arkansas Fine Arts Center, Little Rock, AR; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; the Brooklyn Museum, NYC; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC; the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; Morgan Library, New York; National Academy of Design, NYC; New Britain Museum, CT; New York Public Library; Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC.

Bob is represented by Davis & Langdale Company, Inc., NYC.