Wtclr by Robert Andrew Parker, Aview of AChouka, d1987

Frame: 29 3/4" x 25 3/4"
Watercolor: 24" x 19 3/4"

Robert Andrew Parker
(source: rachelwallsfineart.com) Parker was born May 14, 1927 in Norfolk, Virginia to William and Harriet (Cowdin) Parker.

Robert Andrew Parker attended and instructed at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Photo of the school’s campus in 1974 by Thomas Crotty. Photograph courtesy of the Estate of Thomas Crotty.

Robert Andrew Parker graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1952 after serving in the Army in the 1940s. He moved to New York after he spent a summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture studying under Jack Levine. Parker continued to develop his printmaking skills at Atelier 17, an historically important printmaking studio founded by the renowned English painter and printmaker, Stanley William Hayter. Robert Andrew Parker was also chosen in 1952 as the youngest artist to show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the — Exhibition of American Watercolors, Drawings and Prints — the exhibition featured Stuart Davis, John Marin, Robert Andrew Parker and Jackson Pollock.

Primarily known for his painting and prints of figures, landscapes and animals, Robert Andrew Parker also produced set designs for operas and films. Early in his career, Parker was hired to travel to France and paint reproductions of Van Gogh's paintings which were used as backdrop props in Lust for Life — the 1956 MGM Technicolor classic film directed by Vincente Minnelli about artist Vincent Van Gogh. Kirk Douglas won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama and Anthony Quinn won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Robert Andrew Parker has made a living selling his art and teaching classes at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Rhode Island School of Design, Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Parsons School of Design, Pratt Institute and the School of Visual Arts in New York. The National Institute of Arts and Letters recognized Robert Andrew Parker in 1962 for “his witty, delicate and astringent content and for the rightness of its pictorial presentation.”

Parker has produced countless bound and portfolio-style books: alphabets, journals of dreams and travels, portraits of women writers, all collected in folios of various shapes, sizes, and mediums. Robert Andrew Parker has illustrated numerous literary classics by authors from Franz Kafka to Joseph Heller; and for the United States Air Force in Rwanda and Panama; album covers for Columbia Records; for The New Yorker, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, Playboy and Time magazines; and one hundred (100) children’s books receiving the Randolph Caldecott Medal and the Robert F. Siebert Informational Book Medal.

Robert Andrew Parker exhibited with Jackson Pollack in 1952 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and recently illustrated award winning Action Jackson-- a biography of Pollack that won the Robert F. Siebert Informational Book Medal.

Robert Andrew Parker is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Between 1953 and 1978, Parker was included in twelve (12) exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art.

Good condition overall