RAY PARKER (1922-1990)

Raymond Parker (1922-1992) was an Abstract expressionist painter who also is associated
with Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction. Ray Parker was an influential art teacher
and an important Color Field painter and an instrumental figure in the movement coined
by Clement Greenberg called Post-Painterly Abstraction. Originally from South Dakota,
Ray Parker entered the University of Iowa in Iowa City in 1940; he earned his MFA in 1948.
From 1948 to 1951 he taught painting at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.
During the 1940s his paintings were heavily influenced by cubism. In the early 1950s,
however, Parker became associated with the leading abstract expressionists of the day,
including Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. Parker soon began to simplify and refine
his works realizing that through abstraction, and color his paintings could convey and
express emotion.

Like Piet Mondrian, Stuart Davis and Jackson Pollock, Parker was a fan of jazz music;
and his interest in Jazz, combined with his interest in abstract expressionism, led to his
improvised painting style. Parker was also a great admirer of the painter Henri Matisse
and he looked to this artist’s work for inspiration in terms of color and form, especially in
his paintings of the 1970s and 1980s. By the late 1950s, he taught at Hunter College in
New York City and he developed a singular style of painting that focused on intense color
and simple geometric shapes. He was represented by the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery, one
of the leading contemporary galleries in New York City during the late 1950s through the
mid-1960s. He is best known by his work of the late 1950s early 1960s called his Simple
Paintings. These paintings are characterized by discreet cloudlike forms of clear, and
intense color set against a white or an off-white background. Parker’s paintings utilizing
this method of stacked, clearly colored lozenges and floating forms are straightforward
and basically geometric in shape. Ray Parker’s works relate to and predict the minimalist
and Color Field paintings of the 1960s, made popular by American artists such as Morris
Louis, Friedel Dzubas, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Helen Frankenthaler, and Ellsworth
Kelly.