About the Artist
B. J. Parker is a realist artist based in Saint Louis, Missouri. His artistic approach amalgamates the ideas he has learned from studying with Ron Cheek at the Texas Academy of Figurative Art, Sadie Valeri, and Patricia Watwood. B. J. is committed to furthering the realist tradition within the contemporary art world and in his work he explores the in-betweeness of the human condition through figurative creations in graphite, charcoal, and oil. He employs traditional practices dating back to Renaissance as a means of meditating on the suffering and triumphs of life. Through engaging the liminality between pain and joy, his work seeks to make space for the individual to consider the value of her or his own life.
Artist Statement:
Over the last five years, using drawing, oil painting, and sculpture, I have explored the role that a fragmented judeo-christian mythology plays in my own identity and meaning making. Using large scale, multi figure narrative paintings I depict individuals searching for meaning in a fractured landscape that parallels the existential milieu of contemporary life. For example, in a central piece of my latest body of work, Building a New Myth, I portray individuals straining to construct a new sense of purpose with fragments of an old world that no longer serve them. In order to expand the viewers’ experience, I also created small scale drawings and paintings on architectural found objects creating relics from the imagined world I paint. By having 3-D fabricated artifacts of the objects depicted in the paintings I tie these different components together, blurring the line between the world of the large-scale paintings and the smaller artifacts from the imagined world in order to create a context in which new ideas and new myths can be born.
Before painting I explore countless sketches, searching for poses and images that organically emerge and then select poses that enable me to constructively critique extant mythology. For example, in Theophany at the Forge I have used the absence of the primary deity from Velazquez’ painting Apollo at the Forge of Vulcan as a means to explore humanity’s connection to the divine in a current context that is far removed from myth. Because I primarily use friends and family members in my paintings, the preparatory drawings give me space to ruminate over the significance of those relationships in my life.
I slowly layer my paintings building luminosity and infusing surfaces with life, using both direct and indirect painting methods. The physical relics and icons I make come from dismantled religious instituions. Palimpsests emerge when I begin arranging these objects and fragments and layer metalpoint and oil paint on them. I arrange and rearrange the objects searching for combinations that both support the reality of old narratives and the possibility of new ones. In the McRee Icon I have combined quartz fragments from a destroyed church with a discarded drawer to create a newly imagined kiot and icon. In The Vanderlou Elizabeth I have used a discarded marble altar piece, fragments of the building, and discarded lotus seed pods to create a new icon that uses the language of judeo-christian myth to imagine something different. Through myth humans find their home in the world. My work creates space to interrogate old narratives and find new ways to move towards meaning.
