Untitled

A South Dakota native, American painter Ray Parker entered the University of Iowa in Iowa City in 1940; he earned his MFA in 1948. He worked as a radio operator for the Merchant Marines from 1944-1945, and from 1948 to 1951 he taught painting courses at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. During this time Parker’s own work was heavily influenced by cubism. In the early 1950s, however, Parker was loosely associated with the leading abstract expressionists of the day, including Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), who, through abstraction, sought to convey emotion and expression.

Like Stuart Davis (1892-1964), Parker was fascinated by jazz music; Parker himself was a jazz trumpeter. The frenzied notes of his music, combined with his interest in abstract expressionism, led Parker toward a more improvised artistic style. Parker was also a great admirer of the French painter Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and may have looked to this artist’s work for inspiration in terms of color and form. By the late 1950s—when he taught at Hunter College in New York City—Parker had developed a recognizable method of painting that focused on intense color and simple geometric shapes.

Called his “Simple Paintings,” these works are characterized by lozenges of lively, intense color balanced against a white or off-white background. Parker’s painting Untitled epitomizes this method. The stacked, brick red and olive green lozenges are straightforward and basically geometric in shape, but Parker’s brushstrokes can be seen in the subtle variations of color tones and ragged edges of the floating forms. In these “Simple Paintings,” Parker intended no philosophical meaning beyond what was represented on the canvas. The works certainly foreshadow the concerns of the minimalist and color field paintings of the 1960s, made popular by American artists such as Morris Louis (1912-1962), Helen Frankenthaler (b. 1928), and Ellsworth Kelly (b. 1923).