Grevillea Study

Unique Contemporary Australian Flower Painting.
Original Painting in mixed media by Deb Parker. Strong contrast coloured flowers. Shows a lot of movement. Modern, cute, bohemian looking .

I’ve been an artist for more than 25 years and in that time my interests have  remained around the things I see here in Australia mostly landscape flowers and birds. I’ve exhibited in galleries and events on east coast on Australia during that time and concentrated my efforts on Australian scenes and Birds with Movement and Light painted in my own style of "expressive impressionism”or "Post Impressionism" .

I used transparent watercolour to begin with and took the things I learned from experimenting with water-based mediums on paper to acrylic medium on Stretched canvas and linen. It’s a process of using multiple transparent layers of paint and dry medium fixed with acrylic painting medium. Because it takes some time for the layers to dry between coats I work in series of several similarly themed paintings over a matter of weeks. This allows me to incorporate random water and brushwork effects into the representational forms I create. All my works are original ideas and subjects are not reproduced unless in a completely different composition.

It’s really difficult to establish the credibility in representation when you work as quickly as I have to using these techniques I have developed over more than twenty five years of my art practice.

My greatest admiration goes to Vincent van Gogh for especially the works done when he was hospitalised but I love the work of our Australian expressionist Margaret Woodward and many of the European artists and transformers of the 1890 to 1920s the greatest stage of innovation I know of.

I love to see in situ photos of my work in my client’s homes, on gallery walls in the many finals I have been included in, in Australia and also in the fundraising events I participate in throughout the year.

My biggest wish is to win a major art prize and I have been in the finals of the Waterhouse Art Prize in Adelaide, The Saint George Art Prize in Sydney, The Stanthorpe Art Prize last time and several of the Lethbridge Gallery’s Prizes as well as others.  Even better work is coming out of my studio now so I'm really excited for the future.
Quality Materials

Transparent Glazes have been used in a unique way to give a more translucent effect. I use the best quality paints and mediums I can get to create the finish that I like and put them on beautiful fine quality linen stretched over kiln dried pine stretchers, thick edged,  painted around the edges and ready to hang. The work has generously sized D hooks and cord at the back. It is varnished twice to protect and enhance the surface.

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With a career spanning almost 30 years, Deb undertook most of her training in Canberra at the Canberra Institute of Art through open access in the early 1990s. Originally from Brisbane she returned in 1996 and has lived and worked here since.

She is an expressionist artist who combines the painterly qualities of acrylics and dry pastel fixed with acrylic medium in many transparent layers to show the underlying drawing. Many of her Paintings are purely acrylic as her practice began in water-based media. She focuses on movement and light on Australian subjects.
Over the past few of years, she has been extending her Australian flower compositions to convey the dance of light across their unusual forms and enlarging them to show how abstract and beautiful they are. The backgrounds mimic light distortions as if referencing some of the effects of the camera obscurer. The forms that constitute the focal points emerge from the surface as the final layers are applied. It’s the desire to make her subject come alive with movement and light that drives this exploration in the expressive gestural mark.

Living close to Mount Coot-Tha National Park in Brisbane and the nearby Botanical Gardens has greatly inspired her recent work. Her compositions are derived from multiple photos and video taken while walking and then compiled in the studio. She starts with a charcoal drawing as a reference then moves on to pastel drawing for the colour study. The studio space is then prepped with several canvases on different easels so she can move around the room working on one piece then the other to work around wet and drying surfaces. Plein air painting is something she goes back to from time to time to reinvestigate the light.

View Deb Parker Artist on Bluethumb