Ray Parker

(b Beresford, SD, 22 Aug 1922; d 1990).

American painter. He entered the University of Iowa, Iowa City, in 1940 and received his MFA in 1948, having worked as a radio operator in the Merchant Marines from 1944 to 1945. From 1948 to 1951 he was a painting instructor at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. In 1949 he had his first one-man show at the Rochester Art Center, MN. During this period his painting was influenced by Cubist structure but after 1947 was also improvisational. He worked as a jazz trumpeter and in 1950 became acquainted with the leading Abstract Expressionists; these two influences strengthened his interest in improvisation and by the late 1950s he had developed a method of applying colour in a random manner. In 1955 he began to teach at Hunter College in New York. The paintings of this period consist of a small number of strongly coloured near-rectangular areas with ragged edges set on a neutral background, as in No. 59 (1959; New York, Guggenheim).

For a few years after 1963 Parker smoothed out the edges of the colour areas, while maintaining a style basically similar to that of his preceding works, as in No. 198 (1964; artist's col., see 1966 exh. cat., p. 16). In some of his later works he experimented with a larger number of differently shaped areas with superimposed lines, as in Untitled (1979; see 1979 exh. cat.). (Source: No author, "Ray Parker," The Grove Dictionary of Art Online (Oxford University Press, Accessed July 7, 2004), )