Oh How Her Gardens Grew!
Life Is A Balancing Act
American Grafitti
Everything But The Kitchen Sink
The Last Supper 
The French Connection
See How My Garden Grows
By Tom Wachunas
“…Also
inherent in this soup of paint, collage and accidents, is the subconscious mind
lending to my creations the unknown factor. Tapping into the subconscious
(which using my untrained hand facilitates) allows me to make work that relies
on intuition, a mixture of art-historical and non-art resources in order to
create funny, sometimes irreverent yet moving imagery.”
-Patricia
Zinsmeister Parker
Obituary: https://www.cantonrep.com/obituaries/pwoo1019397
The news of Patricia Zinsmeister Parker’s
recent passing continues to hit me hard. Her art has been a very frequent subject
through nearly all the years that ARTWACH has existed. Yet overpowering, if not
slowly assuaging my profound sadness at this juncture is my deepest gratitude
for our friendship and the profound impact her art has made on our arts
community in general.
Pat Parker was a flippant deconstructor,
articulating the familiar side-by-side with the enigmatic. Her exquisitely
refined unrefinement could invade our aesthetic comfort zones and rattle our
predispositions for more conventional painting practices. She was a thoroughly
compelling artist, and among the most prolific and important artists I have
ever had the blessing and privilege to know. Equal parts dream weaver and
reality shaper, she always painted in a delightful spirit of palpable muscularity.
Insightful and inciteful, she made art that
wagged a sassy finger in your face and rattled your sense of “finished”
aesthetic decorum. She was a painter seriously engaged in mindful play, often not
too unlike the proverbial kid who refuses to color inside the lines.
Look long enough at a painting by Patricia
Zinsmeister Parker and you might hear her right hand clapping and slapping
while her left hand guffaws and giggles. One complemented and complimented the
other.
Her
paintings are specific events in time. Decisions: the point at which she
stopped painting the picture. As such, arrivals. Prior to those arrivals there were
always stories. History of the artist, indeed even histories of art. There be
ghosts in a Parker painting. Some shout. Some whisper. Some sing and dance.
Actions. Moods. Remnants. Echoes.
Underneath what’s immediately apparent in a
Parker picture, you might find a person or a place or a thing, a riddle or a
rumble, shaky shapes or loose lines lurking inside colliding clouds and
clusters of colors both muted and stunningly electric. A brush with memory. A
life that’s anything but still. An attitude, an essence. A gripping adventure
in unmitigated seeing.
So look long enough. A Parker painting is often
a confluence of the mundane and mysterious. A joining of the very recent and
very distant past to make wholly new,
present moments.
Look long enough. A Parker painting is an
activation of her inexhaustible exuberance at mark-making. You might even hear
the sound of scrubbing, scribbling, or rubbing. Erasing and emoting. Feeling the
push-pull of pure possibility.
Look long enough. Unencumbered by rendering
any laborious illusory minutiae of prosaic details, hers was a larger, deeper
reality: the poetry of the painting process. Of creation.
THANK YOU, Pat, for planting in me an indefatigable
longing, and loving, to wonder, to write, and to look… longer. THANK YOU for
inspiring me with the constancy of your ever-evolving aesthetic. For your
personhood. May you Rest in Peace.
