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