A world of wonder: artist Michael Parkes traveled the globe in search of meaning and found it in the worlds he paints and sculpts

Art Business News, Feb, 2003 by Kevin Lo

A young girl looks on adoringly as a masked juggler tiptoes on a hoop suspended in mid-air while a kitten also takes its first tender steps on the same hoop. One may mistake this scene for the ultimate in dreamy hallucinations, but in truth, it is the culmination of nearly 60 years of beauty, soul-searching, learning and life experience translated into works of contemporary art. The master of this realm is artist Michael Parkes.

In 1944, Parkes was born in Missouri and later moved to St. Louis with his mother. After studying art at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, he taught briefly at Kent State University in Ohio and at the University of Florida.

Parkes wanted to be a full-time painter, but his mother advised him to also teach in case he couldn't make a living as an artist. "I found myself teaching at the university during the most radical, difficult period of the hippie generation. I found myself at 8 a.m. with a class full of students, most of them stoned or horribly hungover. So I ended up being more of a drug counselor than anything else. I realized that teaching is a full time art, and painting is a full time art. I had to choose which one I wanted want to do," he said.

So he decided that his ultimate goal was to turn his attention to art. But he realized, at the age of 24, he needed to see the world in order to be a complete artist. "I thought I was pretty good technically, but I realized I had nothing to say. So I thought, `I'm not going to teach, I'm not going to paint, I'm going to roam the world," he said.

When he met his wife, Maria, they left the United States, "as young hippies having no common sense at all. We decided we wanted to see India, Tibet and all those places. We saved a total of $800 and took off."

After traveling through Europe, they flew to India, Nepal and Pakistan, but it was southern India they liked the most. In order to stay, however, they had to fly in and out of the country to acquire visas, a task that became quite expensive. The couple decided to supplement their expenses by selling old Indian sculptures to interior designers abroad and made just enough to continually re-enter the country. Realizing the practice was impractical, they left India and headed to the south of Spain in 1969.

In Spain they needed a new plan. To supplement their expenses, they joined other travelers they met from around Europe in making jewelry and leather goods and selling them to tourists. Over time, more tourists began visiting southern Spain, and shops began carrying these items. Parkes and his wife decided to open a factory and sell their goods wholesale.

But the daily grind didn't suit the Parkes', so when Maria got pregnant they traveled back to India so their daughter could be born an Indian citizen and the family could attain residency. Their daughter was born in India in 1974, but Maria's poor health soon brought them stateside where Parkes took a job as a commercial artist. Yet again, the daily grind was sheer drudgery for Parkes, and the family returned to Spain in 1975.

Back in Spain, Parkes befriended an artist named Jose Manuel who lived in the apartment below his. Admiring the figurative drawings that he found unintentionally surrealistic (and the $400 profit Manuel reaped from each), necessity bred inspiration. "We were broke with bills all over town. I thought maybe I should start painting again. So that's how I got back into it, with the totally mercenary idea of paying for the grocery bill," he said.

Suddenly, Parkes experienced an epiphany about his world travels and his artistic goals. "The experiences I had in India, all of the philosophy, the esoteric studies and the reason we went there in the first place was an opportune marriage between my previous experiences. Then Manuel came into my life saying I could translate that kind of information into a visual reference if I wanted to," said Parkes. Though he had not painted in a long time, he was technically adept at anatomical drawings. So he decided to combine his physical and cognitive skills to create his art.

This realization helped Parkes find a message for his art. "My work is an attempt to capture magic. I think magic is the complete sense of the unexpected. When something completely throws you off guard, it jars your sense of correctness, because the greatest comfort the mind can have is repetition. So when you see something that is out of the normal sequence of reason and logic, it can have fascinating effects," he said.

In addition to painting, Parkes enjoys working in the print medium of lithography. Sadly, according to Parkes, his work with lithographs will soon come to an end when the two printers he works with retire. These artisans are two of the few left who he believes can technically achieve the kind of detailed, figurative print with 13 to 14 colors that is necessary for his sketches. Parkes is now working with Swan King Editions, his business manager and publisher, to create a book chronicling his career in lithography and the story of the classic artisan tradition.