Katherine Parker

Katherine Parker was born in Durham, North Carolina and grew up in Richmond, Virginia. She studied art history and painting at Virginia Commonwealth University and then moved to NYC in 1981, receiving her MFA from Columbia University in 1983. Parker is known for her large, vividly painted canvases which are characterized by layers of scumbled and abraded oil paint. The final pieces contain the record of the painting process and afford evocative clues to the viewer of the layers and erasures beneath the surface. She studied with Milton Resnick, Louise Fishman and Irving Sandler and was influenced by the rigors and temperament of the New York School.

Parker's paintings have been exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the NY, NJ area including The Hunterdon Museum, The Newark Museum, PS 1 MOMA, The Jersey City Museum, Spanierman Modern Gallery, Heidi Cho Gallery, Gary Snyder Gallery, and the Accola Littlejohn Gallery. She is currently represented by Spanierman Modern in NYC. 

Parker lives with her husband and her two children in Hoboken NJ.

She also maintains her studio there.

Artist Statement

These paintings are part of a group loosely entitled ‘Ghost Town”. I’ve shown them separately but never all together.

They were painted after the loss of my parents and two friends. It was a time in my life I was feeling dislocated. Everything seemed impermanent, slowed down and insubstantial. I wasn’t initially certain how this would translate into my work.

The beauty of oil paint is its long memory - every mark, gesture, and brushstroke is recorded. This history can be covered, but like a scar, it exists under the surface. Sometimes past shapes stubbornly assert themselves. Other times they remain as mere suggestion, traces of color or an imprint.  The painting has a way of stubbornly holding on to voices and forms. And so these paintings began to reflect the idea of impermanence, loss and reformation through the process of painting itself. 

In “Undone“ the large blue shape melts into the field but is ignited by a bright yellow horizon line. In “Asunder” an ocean of blue is rift by shifting planes, marred by scratches, yet remains unified by a deep, pulsing field of color. Finally in “Slippage” the brushstrokes race to form and reform a skewed geometry, leaving traces of a grid that is smudged and jagged, yet alive with energy and light.

My hope is that in the end each painting embodies a kind of hard won beauty, a serenity born of labor and loss.