“Compare [Parkes] with even the best of them, such as Mobius of Theo van den Boogaard, and the difference is immediately apparent. His technique is more painterly, his imagination much less tied within the confines of narrative. In fact, narrative is the last thing one thinks of, confronted with one of Parkes’s images even when, as in some of the earlier works, there seems to be some very generalized reference to a specific myth, such as that of Perseus and Andromeda or St. George and the Dragon.”

“Parkes’s works are more interested in evoking an atmosphere, or capturing his figures on the point of unguessable action rather than right in the middle of something we can all too easily be persuaded we should guess at. This would seem to locate him, rather, among the so-called Victorian Olympians, those painters of an imaginary Classical world in which beautiful, scantily-clad women lounged around accompanied sometimes by exotic but perfectly recognizable pets like large cats or delicately featured birds. Among the likes of Lord Leighton and Albert Moore, the Anglo-Dutch Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema seems must closely akin to Parkes. Alma-Tadema’s vignettes of life in ancient Greece and Rome seldom have any precise reference to myth or even history, and pay as detailed attention to the settings as to the people: Parkes, like Alma-Tadema, has developed outstanding skill in the rendering of veined marble and the textures of various fabrics as they cling to or fall from the curves of his remote yet inviting female figures.”

“But as Salvador Dali, of all people, once observed, ‘the one thing we cannot avoid being, however hard we try, is a modern artist.’ With Parkes we may be reminded, now of some Victorian, now of Botticelli, now of Tiepolo, now (though much more infrequently) of Goya. But all of these, though Parkes has undoubtedly observed them, have been absorbed into an entirely modern sensibility. If we were looking for a twentieth-century stalking horse, we might well look to Surrealists like Dali and Magritte, or to artists from the Neue Sachlichkeit of pre-Hitler Germany, such as Otto Dix or Christian Schad.”

“There is one important distinction, however. In Surrealism or Neue Sachlichkeit there is always a sense of stress and twentieth-century blues beneath the smooth and soigné surface. Maybe there was a touch of that in Parkes at the beginning of his latest phase: the clowns and dwarfs could seem threatening, not all the animals had their claws safely sheathed. But Parkes always seemed to be at least hankering after calm and tranquility, and in his latest works he has achieved it. The calm is such that a longtime student of Zen and practiser of Meditation ought to have reached it, or his studies would have counted for little.”

“Parkes’s art is too close in sentiment to Charles Baudelaire, who conjured up in one of his poems a vision of “luxe, calme et volupte.” As long as the volupte remains a vital ingredient, Parkes cannot fail to excite as well as to enchant.”

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