Leslie Parke

Ever since I returned from my stay as an artist-in-residence at the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France, I have been on a relentless pursuit of painting: light reflections, transparencies, translucencies, glitter, sparkle, shimmer. How light affects natural surfaces, such as flowers, shells and water; and artificial surfaces, such as patent leather, foil, Mylar, transparent ribbons, glass, crystal, and silver. For awhile the more elusive and impossible the image was to paint the more it interested me.

Once I became accustomed to looking at the world through this filter it affected how I saw everything. An ideal landscape for me became one where one could see through water to what was underneath; at the same time see the surface of the water because of the light reflections on that water, and then the changes to the surface from shadows being cast on the water. My landscapes, while slavishly depicting these effects, compositionally became more abstract, often having an all-over composition. In these paintings, I like to think of my subject matter as being “nothing”. It is the “space between”, what you look at when you are not looking at anything; it is the air, not the tree; the light not the landscape; the background not the subject A painting succeeds for me when it seems as though the light is emanating from the canvas.

https://leslieparke.com/

Floating Plates – by Leslie Parke