There is a lot of superb contemporary realism being made these days; this article by Brandon Rosas shines light on a gifted individual.
Georgia-born artist B.J. Parker (b. 1980) has always been fascinated by art, and by life’s big questions. “I grew up steeped in Southern religion and felt a strong pull to the transcendent,” says Parker, whose early memories involve sitting in church and drawing pictures of the sermons on the backs of papers that were in the pews.
This affinity led to an interest in Greek mythology, and in high school Parker learned “bits of Greek and Hebrew so that I could explore the ideas in the texts more fully,” he recalls. Although a career in art was always his goal, consulting his faith community about his interest in the transcendent led Parker first to a career in ministry.
After years of working at churches, Parker decided to pursue a doctorate in religious studies at Texas’s Baylor University, which led to a key realization. “It finally clicked that I had been separating my search for the sublime from the use of visual language, and that I was happiest when I merged the two,” he explains, adding that it was then, at age 34, that he decided to pursue an art career.
Parker enrolled at the nearby Texas Academy of Figurative Art while completing his dissertation at Baylor, and later he studied online with Sadie Valeri and Patricia Watwood. Today, he is recognized as an associate living master by the Art Renewal Center, is lead instructor at the Gateway Academy of Classical Art in St. Louis, and creates art that explores the narratives humans use to make sense of the world.
“In my last body of work, In Search: (Re)building Myth, I imagined a world in which the loss of all meaningful stories led to a collapse of civilization that left individuals searching for ways to understand the past and build new stories,” Parker says. “I also made several artifacts that could come from this world, items that I saw as being quasi-sacred and used by common people.”
One such work is “The Overly Icon,” a mysterious piece Parker created by painting a portrait on pieces of marble from a decaying St. Louis building and float-mounting them in a 19th-century icon box known as a kiot.
“I hope to provoke a sense of wonder and awe in my work, but also to open the door to a bit of fermenting restlessness,” he says. “I think the combination of those feelings can lead to a recognition of the value of humanity and of the fundamental goodness of individual life.”
This article was originally published in Fine Art Connoisseur magazine (subscribe here).
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