An Odyssey Penetrating the
Primal
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| The Optimist |
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| Beluga Caviar |
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| A Good Hand |
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| Old Soles |
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| Lyin' Eyes |
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| Life on Mars |
By Tom Wachunas
"The act of drawing is intrinsic to all
visual art disciplines, and to express
oneself through the basic mediums of paper and pencil or paint and canvas is to
penetrate an interior, subconscious
existence - one that is uncharted, yet rich in creative discovery."
The Cave Paintings Suite / Old Soles Suite –
works by Patricia Zinsmeister Parker / THROUGH
MARCH 29, 2019 / ART AT THE
SCHOOLHOUSE , 2026 Murray Hill Road, Cleveland, Ohio, Suite 108 / 216-721-1507 / Viewing hours: Wednesday
and Thursday 4pm - 7pm; Friday 4pm - 8pm; Saturday 12pm -
8pm; Sunday 1 - 5pm / Please call ahead to make sure gallery is open.
I can’t think of a place more
well-appointed for exhibiting the prolific wildness of Patricia Zinsmeister
Parker than Art At The School House. What used to be an elementary school building
in Cleveland’s Little Italy – Murray Hill School, built in 1907 and closed in
1978 – was renovated and re-purposed in the late 1980s, and some of the
classrooms have since become art galleries.
The vintage look
and atmosphere of the building’s exterior and its internal rooms have been
essentially preserved, and the spacious gallery displaying Parker’s mixed media
paintings from the past few years provides an intriguingly apropos context for
appreciating their visceral physicality and childlike swagger. Here, then, is a
richly varied materiality enlivened by Parker’s intrepid and audacious spirit
which can be alternately funny, mysterious, alluring, and elusive.
On one long wall of
the gallery are 29 small (12” x 12”) paintings on wood panels, some generously
sprinkled with glitter or textured with colored splotches of carved joint
compound. Collectively, these pieces from Parker’s “Cave Paintings” series have
all the disarming abandon and charming snap-crackle-pop of a children’s art
show. I certainly don’t mean this in any way to be disparaging or dismissive. Beneath
all of Parker’s constant tides of iconographic eclecticism and stylistic
eccentricities is an irresistible undertow. A primal force. It’s the same
ineffable force that feeds the impulse in a child to literally draw out, or
excavate, pure intuition. And it’s this same force that Parker boldly taps in
making a deliberately imperfect art. It’s nevertheless a sublime art,
celebrating refined un-refinement with often jarring rawness.
While some of her Cave Paintings incorporate
actual objects or found images, she doesn’t paint slick pictures of objective
realities so much as she paints attitudes. Parker has constructed an intensely
personal, codified language, if you will, describing her odyssey into the
primal with more adjectives and adverbs than nouns. They may be enigmatic or
whimsical symbols of remembered situations or conversations, but they’re not so
cryptic that they altogether prohibit us from construing a narrative, or imagining
our own dialogue with them.
Dialogue of a kind
is an active ingredient in the considerably larger canvases from her “Old
Soles” series. She wields a wry and witty brush in these scuffed-up wanderings
into ambiguous mindscapes, articulating a frenetic graffiti of the
subconscious. Awkward, blotchy shapes and scratched words and phrases mingle
together, floating within, or disappearing behind loosely painted fields of
pale color. Scribbled figures step forward, then back into a mist. Life on Mars
indeed. Are these nervous expeditions through unfamiliar terrains without a
map? Is this a psyche deciding whether
to reveal itself or run away?
Insightful and inciteful, Patricia Zinsmeister
Parker makes art that wags a sassy finger in your face and rattles your sense
of “finished” aesthetic decorum. She’s a painter seriously engaged in mindful
play, and in the process, not too unlike that gleefully recalcitrant kid who
refuses to color inside the lines.
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