It was a rainy afternoon and as I was coming home from class, I passed two framed posters of Michael Parkes, leaning against the garbage dump. They had been obviously thrown away by a student leaving Amsterdam.

One was his famous ‘The Juggler’ and the other ‘Tuesday’s Child’, both so intrinsically dramatic. Both the paintings are in his magic realist style where he had a realist’s artistic hand, while his subject matter was magical.

It was just a matter of time before I tracked down the Steltman Gallery that shows his work and met up with Gerrit Steltman in his gallery on 799, Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. What fascinated me was the black-faced Langur that I saw in ‘Tuesday’s Child’ and the saree in ‘The Moon Thief’ which made me sure of Parkes’s Indian connection.

“Michael Parkes is America’s leading Magic Realist painter and printmaker. Though he studied graphic art and painting at the University of Kansas, his unique style evolved very much in isolation, after a period in which he gave up the practice of art altogether and went off to India in search of philosophical illumination.

From hippie generation

Born in 1944, he was very much of the hippie generation. Earlier on, he had painted in the generally Abstract Expressionist style normal among his teachers, but after his pause for reflection he began to draw and paint in a meticulous style of detailed representation which would enable him to give full expression to his inner world of images,” explained Gerrit Steltman, as we looked at Parkes’ paintings, lithographs and bronze sculptures on display in his gallery.

Michael Parkes could be called a symbolist because in his work he takes the extraordinary and makes it seem ordinary, or remarkably believable. Parkes makes the fantastic seem real, making us see and accept the fabulous through his artist’s third eye.

Obviously it is his personal history – his emotional, intellectual and spiritual background that comes out so strongly in his paintings. Born in the rural mid-west in the USA, Parkes was an only child with a dreamy disposition. He loved reading and indulged in science fiction and fairy tales as a young man. He was gifted with the capacity to draw what he thought and his art impressed his teachers in school.

When he was eight, his mother took him to the local art gallery in St. Louis, a nearby town. It was there he knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. He went to Art school at the University of Kansas and there he became an Abstract Expressionist.

Graphic techniques

He was a success, moving on to become an instructor in graphic techniques at Kent State in Ohio and later at the University of Florida. However, Parkes felt disillusioned and in 1970 apparently went through a spiritual and mental crisis.

This was the heyday of hippiedom and so along with his new wife and $800 in his pocket, he threw up his job and went off to Europe and India with Maria. He had given up painting altogether and decided to find what life had in store for them. In India, where he lived for four years, the Parkeses learnt crafts like batik and working with leather and making jewelery.

Studying yoga

This helped them earn a living, while they studied yoga and the philosophy of Sri Aurobindo. However, Maria grew gravely ill with the birth of their first child and so they returned not to the United States, but to settle in Spain, in Europe.

There fate took over, and his chance contact with a neighbour, who was also a painter, rekindled Parkes’s long dormant artistic urges. This time he took off with both realism and magic in one frame of his painting: this was the key he had been unconsciously looking for.

And this time, instead of taking up where he left off, he recognized through the work of his new friend, that representation was the answer to his problem.

“The Juggler is Parkes’s first of ‘the rope’ series,” said Gerrit Steltman. “Parkes changed the image many times in the painting as he initially wanted the rope attached on the other side like a tight rope. The colour of the juggler’s costume too he changed several times.

Finally a conspicuous ladder propped up against the rope was removed. The rope was made into a circle, the juggler’s costume lightened, the ladder disappeared and viola! The picture was perfect.”

“Tuesday’s Child is an oil on wood, and another of his rope series,” explained Gerrit Steltman. For me the painting with the black-faced langur which I remembered in Bandipur and Mudumalai, was intriguing.

Tuesday’s Child

“The painting can be seen from two levels, with the title referring to a verse describing the days of the week. Hence ‘Tuesday’s Child’ is full of grace. Ballet, one of the highest forms of grace combines strength and grace as a wonderful metaphor. But grace is not calculable or bound by logic. It cannot be demanded as a right and works mysteriously like the painting portrays.” 

‘Illusion of Change’, a more recent painting showing the juggler on the rope can be viewed in the Amsterdam Gallery of Gerrit Steltman. One cant help but stare awestruck at the feeling of magical realism executed so effortlessly by Parkes in this painting.

His oil on wood Sky Meditation is riveting, with a graceful woman perched on a strange man-beast head and a crouching tiger at her feet. Talking about this painting, Parkes supposedly recited the following verse:

You should enter not a mountain,
But your own mind
Make your hiding place,
In the unknown.       ––– Shido Munan

Parkes is not the only male artist in the western world to be hyper-sensitive to the female form, but his work is not a Botticelli or a Matisse. It is difficult to play the usual critical game of compare and contrast with Parkes’s art: it is sui generis.  His passionate interest in mythology and legend is obviously the well spring of his genius.