BAM brings Portland to Boise

The Boise Art Museum is currently running a piece of Portland in our own backyard, including 23 works by Oregon-based painter and educator Lucinda Parker and a group of masterworks from American artists.

Lucinda Parker’s “Northwestern Perspectives,” a collection of new paintings, provides more of her distinct style.

Parker has become one of the Northwest’s most prominent painters, utilizing vibrant colors and forms in her work, amplifying line and shape.

Yellow, black and white are seen most frequently in combination and this gives Parker’s work a dynamic, popping quality.

This contrast dramatizes the pieces. The bright colors leap out from the black, making the black more absolute, as if space itself has become absent, leaving nothing.

Parker draws much of her inspiration from nature, and while nature is faintly present, it is the geometry in her paintings that is most discernable. The marriage of the two makes for artwork that is beyond compare.

Lines are bold; angles interject infrequently so that they often become the focal point of the work.

Parker has been building her abstractions for over 30 years, each piece springing from the one before it so that the evolution is continual.

This collection consists of paintings and drawings completed between 1999 and 2002. Some of her pieces are being presented for the first time at the Boise Art Museum.

Parker works primarily in acrylic, varying her surface from canvas to wood. She also does charcoal sketches on paper, three of which are included in this installation.

Parker is very close to her art. For her it seems to be an organic being in itself, complete with its own consciousness.

Parker does not plan her work, but simply begins painting and allows the work to lead her around the canvas, picking out the natural shapes that appear and building on them.

In addition to Lucinda Parker’s contributions, BAM is also hosting “American Masters,” a collection of paintings on loan from the Portland Art Museum.

This is an assortment of works by some of America’s foremost painters, and is a rare opportunity to view historic pieces of art.

Early American art consisted primarily of commissioned portraits of patrons and their families or of biblical scenes, but by the mid 1800’s other forms were gaining acceptance.

Still life, scenes of everyday life and particularly pristine American landscapes became popular.

Artists left to find an education in Europe, but upon returning fostered a unique style marked by the American ideals of individuality and spontaneity in which Impressionism played a large role.

In the first half of the 20th century, the focus of art altered with the development of abstractions such as Cubism and Fauvism. Where attention had previously been directed toward nature, it now pivoted toward urban environments as social and economic issues came into play.

Some artists continued to paint rural scenes – people going about their daily lives.

This exhibition presents a diverse cross section of work.

Both Lucinda Parker’s “Northwestern Perspectives” and “American Masters” run through Oct. 20.

Kate Roberson, The Arbiter

Related Posts:

1. Renowned painter Georgia O’Keefe’s exhibit at the Boise Art Museum
2. BAM celebrates women artists
3. Coming to the Boise Art Museum
4. Chihuly glass collector to speak at BAM
5. BSU Prof’s exhibit at Boise Art Museum shows the real nature