Greg Parker: Interstices

*Untitled.1011,* Oil, wax, powdered pigment, and graphite on gesso panel, 12” x 24” x .75”

September 8 - October 22, 2022

Featured Artist

About The Show

Featured

Greg Parker

Greg Parker is a Maine artist who has lived and worked in the Greater Portland area for more than 50 years.

The material process of my work begins with wood panels. The paintings have a structural presence that is almost architectural: they are built as much as they are painted. The rigid form allows me to cover the panel with up to 20 layers of gesso, sand and then compress the paint materials. I don’t use brushes or commercial products. The paint is constructed in layers with various mediums, pigments and metal powders. The paint is applied in strategies - design systems that are applied in progressive steps.

Each of these strategies adds, obscures or alters the previous layers but they all affect the final surface. Even though there are many layers, the physical depth of the paint would require measuring in microns. I use mathematical systems to build the structure of my paintings. They have rational properties that define dimensionality with measurable boundaries, predictable conclusions and familiar utility. The structure’s simplicity is refined and elegant and their purpose appears to have an indisputable certainty. The completeness and lack of ambiguity has a calm presence. It provides an approachable even seductive opportunity to engage further.

As we look past that initial reading we begin to notice contradictions: movement, vibration, shapes that shift, color that disappears, solids that become vapor. We begin to sense that simultaneous conditions exist that question the certainty of the order. It is not so much a duality of conditions or an undermining of confidence in what we know but a simultaneity of multiple qualities and conditions that occupy the same space. My work is a compression of physical materials but also an expansion of thought and sensation. I use a range of associative elements that trigger recognition, contradiction and evolution: a physical object that refuses to stabilize its identity.

— Greg Parker