Michael Parkes - The World's Leading Magic Realist Painter

Michael Parkes, born in 1944 as an only child is said to be the world's leading Magic Realist Painter. He studied graphic art and painting at the University of Kanas and planned to be a teacher, but he gave up art altogether in search of philosophical illumination. A child of the hippies generation, by 1970 he and his young artist and musician wife, Maria Sedoff went to India in search of illumination. He was twenty-five.

They lived there happily for three years until the birth of their daughter and decided to move to Spain to ensure a lifestyle that would give them access to modern medical facilities and other amenities that he and his wife had grown up with.

I believe it is his time in India that added such a depth to his paintings and his stone colour lithographs, an art medium that he has mastered. Parkes' images evoke something deeply archetypal in our consciousness as well as being exquisetly beautiful.

So many of Parkes' painting offer up images of the Goddess in many forms, something not seen by many of today's artists. Because of the surreal beauty of his paintings, Parkes now sits in the top 1% of artists who have become successful while they are still alive.

London Times Art Critic John Russell Taylor has this to say about Michael Parkes: "Of course, Parkes has always been exceptional among his generation in his unflagging pursuit of beauty. The goddess/angel/women in his paintings are always what in any other hands one would call impossibly beautiful. "In your dreams, fella!" one might be tempted to cry. But if the dreamer happens to be called Michael Parkes, then everything is fine, for he has the total conviction in his own dreams, backed up by the requisite crystalline sureness of technique, which enforces belief in the observer. Some call it Magic Realism, and both parts of the equation apply, in that the realism of the treatment is undoubtedly dusted with magic."

"The dreamy boy, enclosed in his own imaginings of fantastic animals, remote yet erotically potent beauties, moons and stars and strange celestial manifestations, and the occasional slightly sinister grotesque, has grown into the man unashamedly ready to follow his own visionary gleam."

"The "things" in Parkes's later paintings and lithographs go one better. They are not "almost" anything, but very fully and precisely occupy their own space, even before Parkes has gone one step further, by taking up sculpture. The two-dimensional images are already extremely specific. They could almost be described as photo-realistic, except that they are of something no one could hope to photograph, in this or any other world."

You can get his prints most anywhere, however I suggest you get them preframed as they are so much nicer that way. You can also get his paintings as posters. A lot of his originals are on display at the Steltman Galleries in Amsterdam, someplace I will go someday to see his and Vincent Van Gogh's works as well.

I have several of his prints and one day hope to own an original, which can equal the price of a small car.