Leslie Parke's photographs of the last three years grapple with the Modernist concern with abstraction and surface, but bring this forward into a 21st-century digital language. They incorporate contemporary concerns about the nature of reality, the trustworthiness of our perceptions and the sustainability of our civilization, while offering visual and intellectual delight.

1. lesliePARKE

2. introduction by Robert Wolterstorff
notes by Leslie Parke
PARTICLE / WAVE
photographs by lesliePARKE

3. Book design by Carol Jessop
ISBN 978-1-365-25129-0
Copyright © 2016 Leslie Parke
All rights reserved
INTRODUCTION
TK
Robert Wolterstorff
Benington Museum
Bennington, Vermont
(Cover) Particle Wave, 34 inches x 52 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2016

4. For years I used photography as an aid to my painting. Then I had two studio visits back to back, with Robert Wolter-
storff, director of the Bennington Museum, and Greg DeLuca of 3 Pears Gallery in Dorset, Vermont. Both asked me why
I didn’t print my photographs. In each case my immediate response was, “I’m a painter.”
The seed was planted, and over the next years I upgraded my equipment, and did the things one has to do, if the
photograph is going to be the final piece and not just a means to a non-photographic end.
My approach remains largely that of a painter. I want the photograph to look like a painting and be responded to
as a painting. I looked at archival inkjet printers as a new painting medium. There are things they can do, that you cannot
do in paint and colors that have a kind of luminosity you don’t always find in oils. I was interested in the ways ink reacted
to the watercolor-like paper, and how one can achieve a density in the black that is not always possible in paint. With
this approach to photography, I knew that I needed to do my prints with someone who understood that basically I was
painting with a camera.
Michael Williams has been “making paintings” on his computer for years, and he has the equipment to create large-
scale prints. I have known Michael since he first came Bennington in the 1970s from St. Martin’s School of Art, at the
recommendation of Anthony Caro. Our visual language is the same. Michael understands what I am trying to do, and
I have come to rely on his reaction to my work. When he says, “It looks too much like a photograph,” I know it’s a dud.
Just to be clear, these are all unadulterated photographs. The images are not created in photoshop. When I photo-
graphed wrapped cargo, I liked the fact that the surface changed with the light and weather, that it reflected what was
around it. The local color of the object was almost never the color that you saw. These surfaces worked like Monet’s
pond, reflecting the atmosphere around it.
This Spring when I was a resident at A.I.R. Vallauris in the south of France, I wasn’t sure that I would find the quali-
ties I now sought for my photographic prints. The light was glaringly bright. Vallauris had seen better days. Once the
center of ceramic production, made famous by Picasso, it is now almost devoid of ceramicists. The businesses that once
catered to tourists are largely empty; the windows are smeared with white to obscure the interior of the stores. The
surface of the windows are covered with bits of colored paper and tape, where one event poster after the next is put
up and torn down. These store windows appeared to me as found paintings -- a Kandinsky on glass, but with incredibly
ambiguous space, leaving the viewer confused as to where he stands in relation to the object.
Since going to France, my understanding of what I want to do with my photographs has become clearer — even as it
becomes more complex. It is like exploring the ideas of physics. I undo what it is that we understand about something. Is
it a painting or a photograph, is it something real or something abstract, are we looking through something, at something,
or at something reflected. I think that the more times I am able to multiply these questions, the more interesting things
become.
My feeling is that this is evocative of the particle/wave conundrum, whereby what something is, is altered by being
observed.
Leslie Parke
Jolly 25, 34 inches x 22.5 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2015

5. Smeared Window, 34 inches x 26.5 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2016

6. Golf Juan 1, 22.5 inches x 34 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2016

7. Florida Boatyard, 34 inches x 22.5 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2016

9. Stone Surface, 34 inches x 34 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2014
(Previous page) High Road, 34 inches x 25.5 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2016

10. Reach, 25.5 inches x 34 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2014

11. Stacked, 25.5 inches x 34 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2015

12. Trace, 34 inches x 22.5 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2016

13. Organics, 22.75 inches x 34 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2015

14. Isle of Lamb, 34 inches x 28 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2015

16. Tiger by the Tail, 34 inches x 22.5 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2016
(Previous page) Mountain Flow, 22.75 inches x 34 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2015

17. Maine Landscape Reflected, 23 inches x 34 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2015

18. Tutti Fruiti, 34 inches x 22.5 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2015

19. Blue Column, 34 inches x 25.5 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2015

20. The View from Here, 25.5 inches x 34 inches, Archival Inkjet, 2014

21. Leslie Parke, a painter from upstate New York, is a recipient of the Esther and Adolph
Gottlieb Grant for Individual Support, the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest grant as artist-in-
residence at the Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France, and the George Sugarman
Foundation Grant, among others. Her exhibits include the Williams College Museum of
Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; the Museum of the Southwest, Midland, Texas; the
Fernbank Museum, Atlanta, Georgia; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin;
and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Parke has a BA and MA
from Bennington College. Her work is in numerous corporate and private collections.
Her paintings are currently on exhibit in Washington, D.C., Houston, Texas, and Boston,
Massachusetts.
ANDREWCICCARELLI