Billis Williams Gallery is pleased to present Richard Parker: Double Take: Magnifying Beauty In The Ordinary, the gallery’s first solo exhibition of the Southern California artist’s oil paintings. The exhibition features Parker’s oil paintings of oversized pencils and eraser and continues through April 29th.
Richard Parker’s paintings are exquisitely rendered portraits of ephemeral objects more often used to create artworks than as the content. With a nod to Pop Art, Parker focuses on the most elementary of subjects: the very materials artists use to create their work – pencils, eraser, and pastel sticks.
Parker balances the pristine with a touch of whimsy in his canvases – oversized and almost flawless in their depiction, Parker nonetheless includes the marks of hand sharpening on the pencils and of use in the pastels. Only the erasers are shown in their unused sublime perfection – speaking to that moment before the work begins and when all things feel possible. Defiantly simple and elegant, the paintings are formal in their geometry yet masterfully playful in their content and scale.
Richard Parker received his BFA from the University of Texas, Arlington, in 1980 and his MFA from the University of Southern California in 1983 and has exhibited extensively throughout the US since the his first exhibition in 1983. In 2014, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition, “Richard Parker: Poetic Illusions,” at the USC Fisher Museum of Art in Los Angeles, CA. His work appears in numerous private collections and was recently featured in American Art Collector magazine (April 2023). He lives and works in Pasadena, CA.
