Joseph Parker, Untitled (1973)
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The Visions of Joseph Parker, part IV
“Walter Hopps, former curator of the Smithsonian Institute and Senior Curator at the Guggenheim Museum, included Joseph Parker’s work among the California visionaries celebrated in his decisive book of 1977, Visions. Hopps describes the artist as presiding ‘over his model universe like an ecstatic god, bestowing it with a wealth of finely detailed contour, texture and local color, all executed with a consummate, meticulous, precision-tooled craftsmanship, breathtaking in its hyper-real clarity.’
Parker worked from the memory of his super-conscious visions. His kaleidoscopic skies, like Persian rug sunsets, present complex, mandalic haloes radiating from a brightly dawning, transcendental sun. Great artists map a new region in our consciousness, and their depictions allow us to visit the Divine imagination where, in the words of Ibn Arabi, ‘God meets God.’ Parker’s body of work evokes the heavenly world to come. As there is a ‘Blake Land,’ a ‘Fuchs World’ and a ‘Mati Klarwein Island,’ there is a mapped area of awareness called ‘Joseph Parker.’ Joseph Parker painted the sun’s rays expanding out in boundless brocade tapestries, patterned fields of rich color, both intricate and elegantly simple. The recurring motif of a centralized sun over landscape, ocean or mountain, became emblematic as Parker’s signature.
In an homage to Joseph Parker, in December of 2008 Alex began the painting, ‘Ocean of Love Bliss.’ Two lovers in the ocean embrace before a sky resonant with the patterns of Joseph Parker. In the hearts of the lovers is a bright light, shared by the sunrise. While painting this piece we got the tragic news of Joseph Parker's death. Thank you, Joseph Parker, for mapping an authentic aesthetic advancement toward super-consciousness. ...
Joseph Parker died to this world, at age 79, at 6:30 a.m. on May 17, 2009, in Desert Hot Springs, CA.”
— Joseph Parker, Carl Hammer Gallery