Robert Andrew Parker
Parker began drawing as a young boy living in Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
“I contracted tuberculosis when I was about 8,” said Parker. His father, a dentist in the U.S. Public Health Service, asked to be transferred to serve at a tuberculosis hospital in Fort Stanton, New Mexico, where his son could be treated.
“I spent about a year outside on the porch at a high altitude. I entertained myself by painting, drawing and reading. That’s what I did all day.”
Three wars fueled Parker’s imagination: the Spanish Civil War, the second Italo-Ethiopian War and the Japan–China War. “All the news stories were on the radio. I drew images from what I gleaned from the radio reports.”
Parker served as an airplane mechanic during WWII. He turned 18 just months before the war ended and never saw combat. War would remain an important theme in his work throughout his career.
Parker became a student at the Art Institute of Chicago on the GI Bill in 1948. He graduated with a bachelor‘s degree in art education in 1952. His first art show was held at the Roko Gallery in Greenwich Village in New York City. “I was very lucky,” said Parker, as several of those paintings were purchased by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and New York socialite Blanchette Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller.
Around this time, Parker was chosen to play the hands of Vincent Van Gogh in the 1955 film “Lust for Life,” starring Kirk Douglas. He created more than 90 paintings and drawings used to portray Van Gogh’s art during the production. Parker had worked as a teacher at the New York School for the Deaf before he was hired to paint for the movie. “That summer, in 1955, I quit,” Parker said. “I’ve freelanced ever since.”
His career reached new heights when his work appeared in Esquire magazine in 1960. The assignment came about by pure chance. “I painted imaginary war scenes for the boys’ bedrooms in Carmel,” said Parker, speaking about his sons Christopher, Anthony, Eric, Geoffrey and Nicholas. The watercolor paintings depicted an imaginary war. “A friend of mine, Tom Allen who lived in Carmel, told Bob Benton, the art director at Esquire about the paintings. Tom and I brought them in to Esquire and they printed them.”
Parker began working for Fortune magazine in the late-50s, illustrating several cover pages and art for lead stories. The work took him to South America for reporting on the banana industry, to West Africa for a feature on new sources of oil, and to American mid-western states to paint scenes along the Missouri River.
A fellowship with the Ford Foundation allowed Parker to study animals at the Los Angeles Zoo in the late 1960s. He created lithographs depicting monkeys, apes and rural scenes from the region. Several became part of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s permanent collection. A few years later, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship took him to Kilkenny County, Ireland, where he painted watercolors of the local landscape.
Parker went on to illustrate for Time Magazine International – notably covers depicting Burmese activist Aung San Suu Kyi and North Korean President Kim Il Sung. His illustrations have appeared in Sports Illustrated Golf, The New Yorker Magazine and Playboy Magazine, in which he illustrated scenes from Vladimir Nabokov’s novella “The Eye."
Over the years, Parker’s work has taken on various themes: music, war, insects, exotic landscapes, dogs and monkeys, to name a few. His influences include German expressionists like George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and Renaissance painter Paolo Uccello.
Parker’s artwork has become part of the permanent collections at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and, his alma mater, the Art Institute of Chicago.
He has illustrated more than 100 children’s books, including “Cold Feet,” “Action Jackson,” “Mr. Wellington” and “Piano Starts Here: The Young Art Tatum,” a book he both wrote and illustrated.