1960s Ray Parker Abstract Color Lithograph

Description

Artist: Raymond Parker – American (1922-1990)
Title: Red, Orange, Blue, Purple
Year: 1969
Medium: Color Lithograph
Sight size: 22.25 x … more Artist: Raymond Parker – American (1922-1990)
Title: Red, Orange, Blue, Purple
Year: 1969
Medium: Color Lithograph
Sight size: 22.25 x 30 inches.
Sheet size: 22.25 x 30 inches
Signature: Signed lower right
Edition: 75 plus proofs. This one: 39/75
Publisher: Collector’s Press
Condition: Very good
Frame: Unframed

Abstract Expressionist and Color Field painter/printmaker Raymond Parker created this color lithograph in 1969 with Collectors Press in San Francisco, California, working with Master Printer Ernest de Soto. The print bears the blindstamps of the publisher and printer in the lower left. Parker titled the lithographs he created at Collectors Press by the colors in each composition. The print is in very good condition with no flaws noted on the surface. There are mounts on the reverse as well as slight discolorations from old mounts on the reverse. None of these are visible in any way on the front. The print is on heavy Vintage white German etching paper.

Raymond K. Parker (Ray Parker) was born in Beresford, South Dakota on August 22, 1922. Parker entered the University of Iowa in Iowa City in 1940 where he earned his MFA in 1948. From 1948 to 1951 he taught painting at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. During the 1940s his paintings were heavily influenced by cubism. In the early 1950s, however, Parker became associated with the leading abstract expressionists of the day, including Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. Parker soon began to simplify and refine his works realizing that through abstraction, and color his paintings could convey and express emotion.He was known as an Abstract expressionist painter who also is associated with Color Field painting and Lyrical Abstraction. Ray Parker was an influential art teacher and an important Color Field painter and an instrumental figure in the movement coined by Clement Greenberg called Post-Painterly Abstraction. He taught painting at Hunter College in New York.Like many artists of the time, Parker was a fan of jazz music, and his interest in Jazz, combined with his interest in abstract expressionism, led to his improvised painting style. Parker was also a great admirer of the painter Henri Matisse and he looked to this artist's work for inspiration in terms of color and form, especially in his paintings of the 1970s and 1980s. He is best known by his work of the late 1950s early 1960s called his Simple Paintings. These paintings are characterized by discreet cloudlike forms of clear, and intense color set against a white or an off-white background. Parker's paintings utilizing this method of stacked, clearly colored lozenges and floating forms are straightforward and basically geometric in shape. Ray Parker's works relate to and predict the minimalist and Color Field paintings of the 1960s. Parker's work can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, MOMA, Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, all in New York and the Tate Gallery in London, to name a few. Raymond Parker died in New York on April 14, 1990. less