Linda Rose Parkes

I think my subject is always about connection, the threads that bind us to one another and the natural world. Longing, love, a knowledge that we lose our lives even as we live them. But what we hold in ourselves is powerful, haunting.

About Linda Rose Parkes

Linda Rose Parkes has lived and worked as a poet for most of her life, but about 8 years ago she began to paint, searching for visual ways to think out loud. Linda has always loved artists such as Chagall, Odilon Redon, Paula Rego. She is fascinated by the sense of equivalence between artists in various mediums. "I found that laying surfaces allowed images to emerge out of the paint and meant I could start a canvas without having a plan, at first, without too much responsibility! Gradually I began to mix my practice, sometimes starting out with a clearer image of what I wanted to evoke, explore." Creatures are essential to her, the coming together of the other in the form of animal and human, the human animal. She builds colour layer upon layer and often mixes charcoal with paint or watercolour with acrylic. Working through last summer, Linda Rose Parkes painted a series of swimmers. She wanted to capture the feel of being in the sea, and at the same time to explore human states and emotions within a framework of deep water and its inherent symbolism.