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"Learn to do something practical, like play the clarinet," was the sage advice given to painter David Parrish by his father. While he did not become a music major, Parrish did learn to orchestrale color harmonies and compose jaxzy visual imagery throughout his almnst 50-year painting career.
Just look at the work Io your left. What is it? Is it real? Those two questions are, not surprisingly, the two most frequently asked questions by viewers of the art.
At first glance, it is a whoosh of bright colors and strangely distorted rectangles. It looks like a sharp photograph thai was printed on a large sheet of rubber and Ihen pulled and stretched diagonally from corner to corner.
Look closely. What familiar things, if any. do you see?
There's an ignition key hole, a shock absorber, a black gas tank with three red stripes and the letter S and maybe part of a U, a yellow light cover, a Phillips head screw, chrome handle-bars, a foot rest, the number '81, the word "Chevys," some kind of electrical box. maybe a speedometer, some undulating black lines with shades of blue in between. It's shimmering and it all seems enclosed in a transparent wiggly bubble.
But what is it?! What's going on in this painling?
David Parrish attended college at the University of Alabama, approximately 1957-61, and studied panning and commercial art. At that time. New York was where art movements and careers were made and broken. In ilie late 1950s. The predominant movement was Abstract Kxprossionism.
The energized and nonobjective works of Jackson Pollock. Philip Guston and Willem de Kooning were what Parrish's teacliers were telling him to emulate. One day in a drawing class, Parrtsh presented a highly realistic drawing that he had rendered with the use of a photograph. Despite admonitions to make more abstract and expressive art, Parrish held his ground: "Abstraction was not satisfying to me."
He describes the...