Free Form: The Art and Adventures of Erik Parker
Talking with Erik Parker is like catching up with an old friend. Conversations with him flow like the current of a steady river—from unvarnished anecdotes about days-gone-by, to ruminations on the aesthetic brilliance of Parliament-Funkadelic, to the dangers of global warming. Regardless the topic, Erik Parker is stalwart and earnest. It is those same traits that make his art so compelling.
Even after nearly two decades as a professional artist, his work retains an authenticity that many attempt, but few master. Most recently, that mastery is evidenced by paintings which examine the “asymmetric information overload” of the contemporary American media milieu. The cartoonish chaos in these paintings underscores our fractal information diet, while suggesting that the media offers quantity over substance as it endlessly issues manufactured fear for public ingestion. Meanwhile, Parker’s own landscapes provide the counterpoint. These describe Zen scenes of alexipharmic water amid antediluvian beauty.
Life is balance and continuity—chaos and splendor. Parker’s art systemically reflects those polarities and the channels between. Here is Erik Parker in his own words, on the origins and scope of his artmaking.
Mad was taking a jab at the establishment. It was also completely accessible. What drew me to it, and what I try to do in my work, is avoid elitism. Any kind of art which echoes that is not my jam. I find that elitism in the creative industry is often a way to make up for a lack of talent.
Clayton Schuster (CS): What were your first experiences with art?
Erik Parker (EP): Just drawing stuff. Sharks. That started whenever I saw Jaws, which was in 1975 or ‘76, around then. Was totally blown away by it, terrified. I also copied whatever was in Mad Magazine. Don Martin, one of their cartoonists, was just great. Big fan of Sergio Aragonés and Al Jaffee, of course. I was copying a lot from, just whatever I liked and made me feel good. Punk rock graphics, skateboard graphics. Just stuff like that.
CS: What attracted you to the art in Mad Magazine?
EP: The counter-culture element. Mad was taking a jab at the establishment. It was also completely accessible. What drew me to it, and what I try to do in my work, is avoid elitism. Any kind of art which echoes that is not my jam. I find that elitism in the creative industry is often a way to make up for a lack of talent.
CS: Is there a point when you went from being an art student searching for your voice, to being an artist expressing a point-of-view?
EP: Probably 1999. I’d started participating in group shows and getting feedback from the real public, not just the institutional public. From that feedback, I thought, “Okay, I think I’ve got at least two shows worth of work in me. Let’s see what happens.” Then it became a way to survive. For a time, I couldn’t think about this stuff so much. Just got to let it flow, man. I think over-planning kills anything that can happen when you’re in that creative moment.
CS: Being loose works, so you just stay loose.
EP: I don’t like to sit around thinking about what I could make. I like to just get to work. Very blue-collar work ethic. Get up, get to work. It’s kind of an elite behavior to sit around and just talk. Just get to work.
CS: Does a particular work of yours come to mind that exemplifies that work ethic?
EP: All of it. Any of those paintings that are done with figurative heads. They aren’t of particular people. They’re, more so, a way to represent the human condition, for this day and age. We face an asymmetrical information overload. Things don’t connect evenly. For example, you can watch the news online and while you’re watching the news, there’s the ticker crawling at the bottom. I mean, really, you’re listening to one news and watching another at the same time. I try to visually capture that, among other things.
CS: I was wondering about the focus you put on eyeballs and mouths?
EP: That’s kind of historic. I like to use pop sensibilities with the mouth. And then, the eyes are the fun part. I mean, cheeks and chins aren’t that fun. Eyes imply direction. They draw people in right away, they really identify with it.
CS: In the painting “Cahoots,” for instance, the mouths are very pop, very clean, both in terms of figuration and—just literally—they’re enviably clean teeth. It seems like you allow yourself a lot more freedom, though with the eyes. There’s that one eye that’s normal-ish and the other that’s basically swollen shut. Why the clean mouths and dirty eyes?
EP: It just happened. I have no idea. I’m always drawn to Tom Wesselmann paintings, and the mouths in there. They lock you in right away. But I can’t remember why, exactly, for “Cahoots.” Those sit around in my studio for a while and I, kind of, beat on them, back off, and then beat on them some more. “Cahoots” got whatever I felt like it needed at the time. I work with what’s there. I like to back off and let a painting breathe, rather than make a move for the sake of making a move. The eyes on that painting developed over a long period of time, a couple of months. I didn’t want to move on them too fast and close up the composition before I knew what it really needed.
I like to back off and let a painting breathe, rather than make a move for the sake of making a move.”
CS: Is that a typical way for you to work?
EP: I think so. I’m an additive kind of artist. I keep adding, I don’t really subtract. If I’m going to put something down, I’m not going to take it away. If I’m going to put something on canvas, it’s got to be locked in. If I do see something and it’s reading kind of sour later, I’ll step back and just see how I can make it work. But I think all artists are like that.
CS: I’ve talked to some who throw something out if it’s not just right.
EP: Never! Never. That’s not me.
CS: I was reading about your admiration for the genuineness and sincerity of self-taught artists. Can you describe what’s so engrossing about that kind of sincerity?
EP: I’ve been really into outsider, self-taught, whatever, ever since the ‘90s. I’m still into it, of course, but the context around it has changed a lot since. These works aren’t made for an exhibition. They’re made because they have to be made. If you go visit a self-taught artist, they aren’t saying, “Oh, I’m working on this show.” They’re just creating, for hope, just for their vision to exist, just for the sake of making stuff.
CS: Then, do you find it disingenuous for artists to create for the market?
EP: No, not really. But there’s a filter. Or maybe a different lens applied to it. I mean, I can’t make a sweeping statement like that, but there is just that sincerity to self-taught art.
CS: Why do you value sincerity?
EP: It lets you know where you stand, I guess. It feels warm. It’s like Mr. Rogers, it makes you feel good. Otherwise, it’s like you have your guard up and you’re like, “Okay, where’s the hustle? What’s this racket? What bullshit are you trying to sell me?” But that’s pretty cynical. There’s a clarity to sincerity.
CS: When did you start embracing the idea of being an artist?
EP: It took a while. It would have started when I went to the community college in my hometown, San Antonio. I had dropped out of high school and went to get my GED. That was just a great accident. It introduced me to another side of the subculture in San Antonio. I was a punk rock skater kid and there was like four of us in a school of two thousand where the big thing was the athletic programs and stuff like that. So, when I met some of the Chicano students in the art program at the community college, it was like we were all going through the same thing.
CS: What was your early work like at the community college?
EP: Terrible! You know, that department was kind of against the idea of representation. They were all about abstract as the ultimate, the pinnacle fine art. They wanted students to go beyond just direct images. I think back on it as, like… innuendo art.
CS: What was it like to try something new in that environment?
EP: I embraced it. I was very interested, and just delved in. I spent four years there grabbing everything I could. They were heavy into Rauschenberg and Schnabel, and I can only do so much with that stuff. My roots were in that Mad Magazine aesthetic. Sure, I appreciate a good Rauschenberg, or whatever, but it’s not the way I speak or the way I make things. I was completely blind about what was going to happen or what I wanted from the future. I just had no idea. My voice started to find its own after I made the transition to the university level. Being influenced by Peter Saul, who taught at the University of Texas at Austin, it all started to make sense. I felt like it was a big no-no to try to bring a low-brow vibe into that world. Then, all of a sudden, being able to learn from Peter, all that baggage I brought along started to make sense and didn’t feel like baggage at all. It was me. Looking through the vastness of art history before the Internet, you know, it wasn’t easy to find, like, the Chicago Imagists, or Crumb. It was also great to see that someone like Peter Saul was making a living off of that kind of art. Pushing buttons, merging a rawness with refinement, and all that. But there was tremendous push-back from the faculty, and then especially from people I was interacting with after I moved to New York City for graduate school.
CS: What was the transition to New York like?
EP: New York is way more conservative when it comes to art than Texas. In New York, people were always throwing around the term painterly, like saying an artwork wasn’t “painterly” if it didn’t have the drip, or something. Well, what the fuck is painterly? It baffles me. When I look at a lot of the stuff being made now, it mimics so much of Black, southern, outsider art. Kids clamor to get educated at RISD, Yale, and these other schools just so they can learn how to inauthentically riff on this outsider art. Still, the New York scene is way better now than when I got here in the mid-nineties.
CS: What do you think changed, between then and now?
EP: The internet. Access to information at light speed. Likeminded people being able to get together and ask, you know, why people aren’t doing what hasn’t been done, doing what would be cool, why artists aren’t making cool, authentic art.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 49, which is sold out. Get our latest issue, while supporting our independent arts coverage by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.
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