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Robert Andrew Parker

Engrossed

by: A'Dora Phillips & Brian Schumacher

May 16, 2017

Robert Andrew Parker
“I was so lucky... My first show at the Roko Gallery in New York was a great success. It was 1954. During the show, a woman came in who was the art director for "Seventeen”—Cipe Pineles—and asked me to do an illustration for her magazine. I instantly said yes.”
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This oral history is an amalgamation of two interviews conducted with artist and illustrator, Robert Andrew Parker, in his West Cornwall, CT studio. A’Dora Phillips and Brian Schumacher conducted the first interview in August 2014 and the second in July 2015.

Among other things, Robert Andrew Parker discusses:

  • Deciding to become an artist when he was a child and drew all day while recovering from tuberculosis
  • Because his father worked in the service as a dentist, growing up in different parts of the country, including New Mexico, Seattle, and Chicago
  • His art training & early career, including The Art Institute of Chicago, Atelier 17, and his big break playing Van Gogh’s hands in the film biopic, Lust for Life
  • His vision loss, beginning in 2000, due to macular degeneration
  • A series of sculptures he was working on at the time he was interviewed, which he called “Memory Gardens”
  • His long career as a magazine and children’s book illustrator
  • His studio practices
A loosely-rendered scene of buildings in old town Edinburgh at twilight, the buildings dissolving into gray tones in the diminishing light of day, dotted with lit-up windows . There is a copse of spindly dark trees with a path through them, perhaps, and at least two figures in the foreground, rendered like shadows in watery black paint.

Robert Andrew Parker

b. 1927

Comments

Marybeth Highton 4:20 pm | 05.01.25

I just found you, I am not an artist in the great or good or even near good category. But I love art ,I stopped doing it stopped graphic arts because of AMD and neuropathy in both hands a year . after stopping, a miserable year, a speech therapist at my retirement community challenged me to give it a try anyway again , and I did . The thing that I love most about what I found in you is that you don’t discourage AMD sufferers from keeping on. Thank you so so very much for this new place to be and grow. MaryBeth Highton.

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