Leslie Parke brings her large, textured abstractions to Gremillion and Company, Fine Arts, Inc in Houston this month. Her canvasses, some measuring more than seven feet across, and photographs offer rich tapestries of texture and color.
Parke, an upstate New York artist who has been showing regionally and nationally for decades, has recently moved from hyperreal depictions of piles of refuse into more abstracted works. While these may seem like disparate bodies of work, they have much in common. Upon close examination, Parke’s hyperreal images of heaps of shiny bottles and stacks of colorful paper dissolved into a field of color and texture. In her current work, Parke is simply skipping the middle man, bringing us directly to the intricacies and painterly brushstrokes once housed in recognizable images.