About Jonathan Paul Parker
While his practice currently luxuriates in the sensorial realm of acrylic on canvas and paper, Jonathan Paul Parker’s paintings and drawings still carry the flickering charge of his background in the moving image. Each composition is a palimpsest of technicolor shadow work, where the skeletal impressions of his accumulative process—raw pencil notations, graphite armatures, and structural grids—refuse to be buried. The sly visibility of this structural scaffolding is the gravitational force organizing the dazzling optical orbits of his palette, providing a physical record of the mind’s attempt to organize chaos—to slow it down, the better to contemplate its molten core of beauty.
The work exists in a permanent state of restlessness and transition. Traces of landscape and figure emerge and dissolve within the pictorial field; a horizon line might be established with the temporary sharpness of a sun-flare, only to be interrupted by the sudden, percussive cameo of a deracinated torso. There is a jagged friction always at play, where the ethereal light of the Renaissance collides with the giddy specters of Futurism; where Howard Hodgkin, Peter Max, and Henri Matisse go for a hike in the desert and only two make it home alive. But Parker does not merely cite art history—it’s never as head-on as that; he absorbs it for pure energy, funneling the chromatic resonance of Rothko and the rhythmic turbulence of Miró into a contemporary psychic space.
This engagement extends to a rigorous philosophical dialogue, particularly with David Hume’s so very Scottish fusion of naturalism and empirical skepticism and Jacques Derrida’s ceaseless harangue against the very possibility of objective reality. For Parker, these ideas are not arcane citations but active lines of communication that mirror his own process of building and deconstruction. By allowing the "under-drawing" to breathe through the final layers of paint, he invites a witnessing of the internal architecture as it individuates itself—revealing a world whose constructions are its most effective carriers of its truths.
by Shana Nys Dambrot
CV
Jonathan Paul Parker
IG: @jonathanpaulparker
EDUCATION
2000 Live Action Film and Video, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
SOLO
2026 All Shall Be Well, Atheneum Music and Arts Library, San Diego, CA
GROUP
2026 Art of Now: Pushing Boundaries, Union Hall Gallery, San Diego, CA