Lucinda Parker
Regional painter Lucinda Parker creates energetic paintings inspired by natural forms. She works vigorously within the boundaries of abstraction while exploring formal issues of geometry and figure/ground: the relationship of foreground objects and background. During the last year, Parker’s studio was dominated by a large commission project (sponsored by the Washington State Arts Commission) that was recently installed at Lower Columbia College in Longview, Washington. This Cowlitz County piece is influential to the eight large paintings in this exhibition. They echo the watershed imagery that appears in the mural including water, rock, tree, and cloud references. Here Parker’s distinctive color palette, applied on the surface in painterly layers, pulls, drips and scrapes continues to be apparent. This rich surface texture sets off the volumetric forms that play compositionally with the figure/ground. Parker repeatedly creates successful and cohesively driven painting on a national scale. Also included in this exhibition is a series of gouache studies developed during the commission process.
Originally, from Boston, Lucinda Parker received a BA jointly from Reed College and the Pacific Northwest College of Art. She went on to receive a MFA from Pratt Institute, New York in 1968. Her work has been exhibited at numerous one-person shows throughout the West as well as in several exhibitions nationally, including the Corcoran Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Seattle Art Museum, the David Findlay Gallery and the Sue Ellen Haber Gallery, both in New York. The Portland Art Museum honored her with a mid-career retrospective in 1995, and the Boise Art Museum gave her a one-person exhibition in 2002. Parker’s work is well collected throughout the Northwest. Major public collections include the Boise Art Museum, Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University, the Portland Art Museum and the Seattle Art Museum. Public projects include the Lower Columbia College, Longview WA; the Oregon Convention Center, Portland; Midland Library, Gresham, City Hall, Portland; and Southern Oregon University, Ashland.