The Lightness of Being

Leslie Parke paints the universe

Almond Tree - Gourdon, 2020, 48 inches x 48 inches, oil, enamel, metallic paint on canvas

There is a kind of awareness we sometimes happen upon — or more accurately, which can happen to us — if we are lucky. It’s an old thing that presumably goes right back to the dawn of consciousness. Different cultures have given it different names at different times and have built many complicated philosophical and spiritual disciplines aimed at getting us to it. But at its heart, it is not a complicated thing.

Nirvana, Moksha, Satori, Grace, Enlightenment, Transcendence, Cosmic Consciousness. Call it whatever you like. So many names, but probably just the one experience. In the simplest terms, it is what happens when all the anticipatory anxieties, self-interested hungers, resentments, fears and preoccupations of our daily lives momentarily lift, like the heavy velvet curtain in a darkened theater, to suddenly reveal the brightly balanced interconnectedness of all things. What is complicated are the steps we sometimes have to take to prepare the way for such an awakening to occur, hence all those densely layered spiritual traditions, each tailored to the unique habits, preconceptions, prejudices, and superstitions of a particular people.

Energetic Code, 2024, 60 by 40 inches, oil, metallic paint and acrylic markers on canvas

The making of art, whatever else it might claim to do or to be, can also be a doorway to this sort of awakening, and one through which a similarly complex practical discipline can guide us. This is especially true for painters, whose successes, when they do come, are not achieved by design, but through discovery. Yes, a hard-earned practical knowledge resides in the conjoined tools of drawing, composition, color, and the skillful handling of the very material of paint itself. These skills, built through many years of hard work, are the medium through which the art of the painter’s journey is navigated. But the discoveries, when we arrive at them, are not mere demonstrations of that art, but destinations to which the art itself has delivered us.

An art historian and critic friend once told me that all writers have one thing they want to say, and that they spend their whole careers looking for the best way to say it. Leslie Parke’s painting has taken many turns and divergences through the five decades in which she has practiced it. Along that path, she has traveled from a hard-edged formal realism to a kind of abstraction, now so fully disassociated from formal structure that it seems at times to be made from light itself. And yet, one continuous thread of vision persists through all the different iterations of her style. Parke is interested in seeing the whole universe, all at once, through the window of her canvas. Sometimes, if we are willing to be as open in the looking as she was in the making, we will see it there too.

Cerulean Mist, 2023, 60 x 40 inches, oil, metallic paint and acrylic markers on canvas