Oh How Her Gardens Grew!

 

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.