visual arts
A Force
of Nature
LUCINDA PARKER RETROSPECTIVE
AT HALLIE FORD SHOWS
PORTLAND PAINTER’S WORK
THROUGH HALF A CENTURY
By Ester Barkai
‘MEASURING NATURE’ BY LUCINDA PARKER
L
ucinda Parker doesn’t have a contact or
use email. In this day and age that seems
unusual, but upon seeing her art, it sort
of fits.
The art in Lucinda Parker: Force Fields
echoes a different era — in fact, several
eras. Steeped in traditions of modernism
— color field painting, abstract expressionism, cubism —
her paintings are large, gestural and dynamic.
Walking through this retrospective, which spans her
career from the 1950s up to the 2010s, feels like moving
through these parts of art history in the flesh.
Instead of landscapes of Europe, though, we get
paintings of subjects closer to home, in the U.S. and
particularly Oregon.
Parker earned her BA from Reed College and the
Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland. Besides
her retrospective at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art
in Salem, she also has work on display at the Jordan
Schnitzer Museum of Art in “Visual Magic: An Oregon
Invitational,” a show featuring artists who began their
careers in Oregon during the 1960s and ’70s.
In her teenage years Parker often painted self-
portraits, as do many artists at the start of their careers.
Even in her most realistic work in the exhibit, “Self-
Portrait,” which she painted at about 16, she looks at
you through the wonderfully heavy hand of her medium.
Parker was still in high school but, even then, she wasn’t
timid in her approach to oil painting.
The blurb beside “Self-Portrait” describes the
“young artist staring at herself and at what might lie
ahead.” Maybe so. Maybe the young artist was thinking
about the future, but she has on her face the same
expression you see in portraits of Picasso, van Gogh
or Rembrandt — that of someone intensely trying to
describe what they see.
The only other work from her adolescence in the
show, “Waterfall at Garland Pond, Putney, Vermont”
(1959-1960), is a landscape. Though realistically
approached in terms of recognizable subject matter, the
way she applied paint in layers, and at different angles
to represent water moving, speaks to the direction she
would take as an abstract artist, and later as an artist
whose goal was to work toward “meaning.”
That is a term used by her to reference painting
recognizable things. The elements of her future work
are all here: landscape as subject matter, abstract
forms representing nature, the gestural, dynamic and
sculptural application of paint.
Titles can be especially important for abstract art.
They are a way for the artist to give us a clue. That’s just
‘SELF PORTRAIT’ BY LUCINDA PARKER
IN HER TEENAGE YEARS PARKER OFTEN PAINTED
SELF-PORTRAITS, AS DO MANY ARTISTS AT THE
START OF THEIR CAREERS. EVEN IN HER MOST REALISTIC
WORK IN THE EXHIBIT, ‘SELF-PORTRAIT,’ WHICH SHE
PAINTED AT ABOUT 16, SHE LOOKS AT YOU THROUGH THE
WONDERFULLY HEAVY HAND OF HER MEDIUM.
what Parker says she did with her painting “Cythera’s
Gift” (1985).
The reference to Greek mythology is a sample of
her fondness for literature. Her titles often play with
language. Her 1989 painting “Sur Peint,” for instance,
references two languages, French for “painted on” and
English for “serpent.”
“Measuring Nature” (1999) is a more straightforward
title. For isn’t that what artists do, whether depicting
landscapes or portraits, or even abstractions — describe
what they perceive in nature, even when that perception is
their own response? That painting is hung with “Radicle”
(1999), done the same year and with the same dimensions
and format. They “go together,” according to Parker.
The museum suggests they are companion pieces as
well because of their subject matter: “They both deal with
sweeping forms suggesting forces of nature that confront,
nonetheless, wiry apparatuses for measure and calibra-
tion, perhaps for the harnessing of natural energy.”
The abstract forms in “Measuring Nature” do
seem to sweep, as if they’re moving up, on their way
to somewhere else. They are barely contained in
what appears to be a field of dark space, and the wiry
apparatus mentioned above is a frail device next to the
comparatively large and looming figures before it.
“Measuring Nature” and “Radicle” perhaps served
as the inspiration for the “Force Fields” in the title for
this retrospective. They could also serve to inspire our
consideration of Parker’s life as an artist. She has been a
force of nature since that first self-portrait in the 1950s.
Peering out at herself from beneath the layers of
paint as a teenager, up to her most recent cubist-
inspired efforts, she has been putting in the effort to
measure the world around her, to describe it with color
and gesture and design. Exploring genres, moving from
abstract to content or “meaning,” experimenting with
techniques for applying her medium — her career so far
has been bold and on the move, never still. ■
Lucinda Parker, Force Fields is at the Hallie Ford Museum at Willamette
University until March 31. Parker also has paintings in Visual Magic at
the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at University of Oregon until May 12.
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