Harper Drawing

John Parker is a self-taught professional oil painter, draughtsman, misanthrope and an occasionally noisy introvert. He generally avoids people, living in a house with a barn studio, one mile from the nearest road, in southern Bulgaria. Although this is an attempt at explaining his work and processes, he dislikes writing about himself in the third person and thinks that, creatively, to know what you're doing is over-rated and generally means that you’re not doing something right. Parker’s work explores his own ideas of beauty. He is curious about the strangeness, the uniqueness and unity, of individuals. His idea of beauty is not crystalline perfection or a symmetrical ideal, but the beauty in physical variations, in the way people dress and act, in the way someone’s outward appearance is affected by their internal life and vice versa. Some of his recent subjects include people in the hedonistic spaces created by festivals, celebrations and special events. Although people may privately dream of going out in public dressed as a mermaid, a sparkly elf, a diamonte majorette or a rainbow unicorn, it is only on certain prescribed occasions that people feel they can change their identity, from the mundane to the mystifying. He gives no direction as to how his subjects should act, and the finished piece becomes a window into the life of that person at that time, that instant, as they have allowed themselves to be seen. The deliberate act of giving no background story to his completed works, and of anonymising his titles with serial numbers, encourages the viewer to bring their own stories as the final act in the picture’s life. Subject and painter come together to allow the viewer associative freedom to make their own stories. Better and more varied stories than the reality that started the process. Thirty years working around the world on large scale photo realist advertising commissions, murals and other specialist painting works has left him with an ingrained appreciation for the simple mark, the brush stroke, the smear or the line. In his commissioned work, marks have always had a beginning, a middle and an end, so now, he rarely blends them. A highly finished picture, he feels, only shows its final surface. His show the passage of time. There's also something about a painting, a made object, that interests him. A realist painting has something that a photograph doesn't, and can never have.