Art: Blue in a Red State by Jacqueline Dee Parker
ON THE WORKS OF JACQUELINE DEE PARKER: AN APPRECIATION
I
What comes to mind is a line from James Dickey’s “At Darien Bridge”:
The hopeless look of the sea
Out of which all miracles leap.
Or from Simone Weil’s Waiting for God:
The sea does not look less beautiful
Because we know that ships are sometimes wrecked by it.
It’s a form of indirection—of implication—of impending revelations–how in a field of color, a hinted, cantilevered verticality, hovering, centralized, like a kind of presentiment—greets the sense and deepens it—simultaneously evoking the stillness of a reminiscence as well as its turnings, its almost translucent departures:
the hush of a moment just as it passes.
These are interiors. Fragments layered into a kind of wholeness. Surfaces and incisions. Visual cadences. Incitements. Depths. Tragic and joyful.
Modernist in their uplift, their urbanity, their literary referentials—and yet—something Florentine as well—a secret, evanescent Giotto—a monk’s cell in the Monasterio de San Marco.
There’s something objectionable in my attempts to classify, to label such pleasures.
And yet the eye, and the eye’s idea of itself . . .
Here, a blue backdrop, serene as light passing through ice. Within it scratchings, faint strikes and circles, geometries of movement, of desire, grief—of brokenness, of remaking.
And in the foreground color, texture, line—a collagist’s layered abstractions, suggestive forms, a balancing of earth and air and fire and metal and wood, the cool neutralities augmented by subtle degrees and a startling, surprising exuberance of brightness. The kind of balance one finds in a dancer’s pose when she pauses, the gesture made silent, motionless, amidst the unstoppable generations of her body.
An art that is dance and sculpture. That speaks to a mystery it cannot, will not, resolve into number. And yet a mystery enumerated.
As to influences—Braque, Picasso, Cornell—Wallace Stevens–and a hint, sometimes, of Rothko—in its metaphysics of color–but more humane—more particular—more of the banquet and the recital, the kitchen table and the long drive home in silence, more enclosure, more ground. More inhabited.
And thus the range of evocations: musical staves to stray from (Blue: (In a Red State)); the multivalent glee and regret of illicit lovers (Aubade); a classical ghost emerging from a Dadaist primacy (Blue Moon Bank Shot)—a dangerous, licentious orange (Stacking the Odds)—
Jazz and a string quartet. Their transformations–
This is how one names the many that cannot be named as to name is a constriction:
Book covers that need no further narrative–
because Parker understands that exposition is a diminishment,
that the literal restricts and encloses, that a story opens onto a landscape that continues onward and has no discernible, knowing ending.
And thus these meditations, these welcomings, these self-portraits, these mirrors we discover ourselves within, where our strangeness greets us.
Not, as Mandelstam wrote, “the noise of time”, but its resonance in satin.
She understands that delight emerges in beauty, in the inward made visible, extending outwards.
She understands the kind of innocence that knows its losses.
II
And so. As to the dynamics of history. Not Duchampian, per se, or Dadaist, except, somewhat, in the distances between the object and its titling—its naming, where naming is an invitation: how in those distances once seeks that conceptual leap in which word and image momentarily unite, a poet’s impulse made tactile. And the game of that discovery, the joy of it, in its multiplicities, its unlimited engagements, possibilities.
But no rejection of the ‘retinal’. Here the sensuous pleasure remains a reason unto itself, a luxury that is immediate and speechless and received—that requires no commentary—no distance from the encounter itself. A vision of eros.
And thus the tension between the image and the idea—a double axe that is a double joy:
all art is installation that requires entrance, immersion, surrender—and yes, a reflection.
And in that tension, part of it, instinctive and yet utterly conscious– the importance of language: a word or phrase hovering within, emerging out of, the field of color, the architectonics of dimension, of line—mediating the heavy, mechanical industrial weight of a Louise Nevelson or Jim Love with the lightness, not remotely unbearable, of an Ann Ryan.
Here, then, a mystery, the suggestive aspects of placement, a kind of directional that opens into a broader kind of induction or inference, paced and subtle, building, discretely, out of its own careful movements, like an Elizabeth Bishop poem, into an epiphany.
Or a synesthesia: eye and idea and aurality—the spoken–like the sonics, say, of a Roethke, linkages both inviting and threatening.
As well—no critique or celebration of the mercantile display, the media frenzies. Not Warhol, but after, that question resolved, where all is plyable, imported, made one’s own.
Here, all the world is available. Its tragic exuberance—
where the social is revealed, identified, in its most fundamental phrase: the self poised against and upon and for its confrontation with its own otherness, where it seeks to discover and shape a meaning it can never rest in, and so engages in a perpetual fashioning, frame to frame, each isolating a phase, an expression, in a fluid impermanence where loss and creation, those constant accomplices, meet in a luminous instant.
Where the image is both the moment and its means. A residuum. And the word locates, however transiently, its emergence.
III
And so. Parker’s art as refuge and solace– this interplay of text and color and line, of surface—of placement. Delicate, precise, intuitive—a recognition—of grief, impossibility— of crisis and our saving responses–
as in “The Cottage” that echoing of Munch and Van Gogh–of solitude, loneliness, anticipation, comfort– and beyond the cool, soothing interior, a pastoral—
and beside it “The Long Boat (After Kunitz)”, its meditative companion, a pathos of slow waters, a poetic unearthing, a musical promenade.
It’s an art that embodies the most difficult of vocalizations–the silences that give our words their meanings.
About the author:
Randall Watson is the author of The Sleep Accusations, which received of the Blue Lynx Prize for Poetry (currently available through Carnegie Melon Press), Las Delaciones del Sueno, (published in a bi-lingual edition by the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa, Mexico), The Geometry of Wishes, (published by Texas Review Press), and No Evil Is Wide (a revised version of Petals, winner of the Quarterly West Prize for the Novella, by Madville Publishing,). He is also the editor of The Weight of Addition, an anthology of Texas poetry published by Mutabilis Press. Watson was a frequent contributor to Artlies, where he also served as guest editor, and he was
the Art Editor of Gulf Coast.
Art: Jacqueline Dee Parker
In the artist’s words:
Artist and poet Jacqueline Dee Parker was born in New York City and raised in New Haven, CT. She presently lives in Louisiana, where she teaches in the College of Art & Design at LSU. Her poems appear in literary journals and anthologies, including Cortland Review, The Southern Review, Chelsea, and American Diaspora: Poetry of Exile, among others. Parker’s vintage paper collages and mixed media paintings include materials of human culture that suggest wonder, desire and lived experience. They are exhibited throughout the US and can be seen in private and corporate collections internationally. Devin Borden Gallery (TX) and Ann Connelly Fine Art (LA) represent her work, and she is an artist member of the Baton Rouge Gallery Center for Contemporary Art.
Website: www.jacquelinedeeparker.com
Instagram: @jacquelinedeeparker