Leslie Parke
Golf Juan I
22.5 inches x 34 inches
archival ink-jet print, photograph
© Leslie Parke 2016
Particle/Wave
Artist Leslie Parke will exhibit her large-scale photographs in an exhibition called PARTICLE/WAVE at the Bennington Museum, Bennington Vermont, from October 9 through December 30, 2016. Please join Parke for the Artist’s Reception on Saturday, October 15, 2016 from 3:00pm to 5:00pm in the Regional Artists’ Gallery. The reception is part of Community Day, Celebrating Art which offers free admission all day.
“For years I used photography as an aid to my painting. Then I had a studio with Robert Wolterstorff , director of the Bennington Museum. He asked me why I didn’t print my photographs. My immediate response was, “I’m a painter.” The seed was planted, and over the next years I did start printing my photographs.
My approach remains largely that of a painter. I want the photograph to look like a painting and be responded to as a painting. I looked at archival inkjet printers as a new painting medium. There are things they can do that you cannot do in paint, and they offer colors that have a kind of luminosity you don’t always find in oils. I was interested in the way the ink reacted to the watercolor-like paper, and how one can achieve a density in the black that is not always possible in paint. Basically I was painting with a camera.
Just to be clear, the images are not created in Photoshop. When I photographed wrapped cargo, I liked the fact that the surface changed with the light and weather. It reflected what was around it. The local color of the object was almost never the color that you saw. These surfaces worked like Monet’s pond, reflecting the atmosphere around it. It is like exploring the ideas of quantum physics. I undo what it is that we understand about something. Is it a painting or a photograph? Is it something real or something abstract? Are we looking through something, at something, or at something reflected? I think that the more times I am able to multiply these questions, the more interesting things become.”