“[Michael Parkes] began with one immense advantage: he could draw even before he could read and write, and even as a small child was uniquely well qualified, when he did the classic childhood things of thinking, and then drawing lines round his thinks, to come up with something that even tiresome, unimaginative adults could recognize and appreciate.”

“Other aspects of Parkes’s childhood were not so advantageous – or not necessarily so. He was an only child, which often leads to children’s being dreamy and introspective, especially if their family lives in a small community with not much social life going on all round. The town where Parkes was raised, Canalou, Missouri, had fewer than 300 inhabitants.”

“As a teenager he had become, as many did in the early 1960s, a searcher through the religions of the world, looking for the ultimate truth behind his dreams and visions.”

“By 1970 he had reached crisis point. This was, after all, the heyday of hippidom, when everyone from the Beatles down seemed to be looking to India for enlightenment, and possibly heading off to Kathmandu in order to find it. Parkes had recently got married, to a young artist and musician called Maria Sedoff. Most people would see that as one of the traditional ways to persuade a restless young man – in 1970 Parkes was only 25 – to settle down, but instead he found in Maria a co-conspirator. Throwing up his teaching career, they set off with $800 in their collective pocket, for India (where else?) and hippie heaven. It may not have been quite heaven, but they lived there happily in total for three years, and it was only when they started a family that they felt that they would prefer their daughter to be brought up nearer to the amenities (especially medical) they had both been used to in their former life, and backtracked to Spain.”

Michael and Maria continue to reside in Spain, where visions of the Rock of Gibraltar and Morocco glimmer in the sunset through Michael’s studio window.

John Russell Taylor, art critic for The London Times
(Author of the book: Michael Parkes
Stone Lithographs - Bronze Sculptures)